A Scientist's View of Government Control Over Scientific Publication

for patents on cryptographic devices by computer scientists, but later withdrew the orders. An employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) attempted to prevent disclosure of new results at an IEEE symposium in 1977; although he was acting on his own, his action caused much alarm in the research community. The NSA attempted to get NSF to share responsibility for funding cryptographic research with NSA; this too led to misunderstanding and consternation. At the NSA's request the Public Cryptography Study Group was formed in 1980; this group has since made a recommendation for a voluntary system of prepublication review of papers on cryptography. [See Communications of the ACM, July 1981, pages 434-450].