On 12/23/15, John Young wrote:...

http://bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/crypt.html

''' ... The result of the NSA query was that Bob and I--the arrangements were made by him--received a visit from a man whom Bob called "a retired gentleman from Virginia." He was quite a charmer. What he said, over lunch, was: there was no statutory reason why the paper should not be published. It was true that there were some who thought that crypto methodology should be "born classified" as some atomic energy research is, but it was not. (Bills to this effect were later proposed in Congress but never passed). Furthermore, the RG said, there were many in the agency who thought that publishing such papers was inevitable and harmless; he himself held this view. There were also some who believed that this kind of publication might cause them real problems. He recalled the good old days when public and academic interest in cryptography was confined to newspaper puzzles. He got a bit more specific about two things: the agency didn't particularly care about the M-209. What they did care about was that the method that Reeds had discovered was applicable to systems that were in current use by particular governments, and that even though it was hard to imagine that these people would find the paper and relate it to their own operations (which used commercially-available crypto machines), still... perhaps we should exercise discretion? It was certainly legal to publish, but publication might cause difficulties for some people in the agency. '''