Notes - Burdens of Proof - page 201

22. Bamford, The Puzzle Palace , 456. Such restrictions were hardly without prece-
dent. The most famous case occurred in the aftermath of the World War I. Stating,
rather surprisingly, that “gentleman do not read each other's mail,” U.S. Secretary
of State Henry Stimson closed down in 1929 the main American cryptological opera-
tion. Unable to find work, its former head, Herbert Yardley, published a sensational
tell-all, The American Black Chamber : a minor best-seller, it not only detailed the
scope of American cryptological activities, but also documented the interception
and decryption of Japanese diplomatic dispatches during the disarmament confer-
ence of November 1921. The ensuing Japanese fury prompted swift American reac-
tion over Yardley's following literary project: the manuscript of Japanese Diplomatic
Secrets: 1919-1921 was seized and impounded by the U.S. government. Although
neither Yardley nor his editors faced charges, Congress promptly passed into law
the so-called Yardley Act, forbidding “the publication or sale of diplomatic codes
obtained by virtue of one's employment by the United States.” See David Kahn, The
Reader of Gentlemen's Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
23. David Kahn, “The CRYPTO '82 Conference, Santa Barbara. A Report on a Con-
ference,” Cryptologia 7, no. 1 (1983): 1-5.
24. Susan Landau, “Zero Knowledge and the Department of Defense,” Notices of the
American Mathematical Society 35, no. 1 (1988): 5-12. See also Harold C. Relyea, ed.,
Silencing Science: National Security Controls and Scientific Communication (Norwood:
Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1994).
25. As described by Kevin Kelly, then editor in chief of Wired , in a blurb for Steven
Levy's Crypto .
26. For example, Ron Rivest wrote in Scientific American : “The widespread use of
cryptography is a necessary consequence of the information revolution. With the
coming of electronic communications on computer networks, people need a way to
ensure that conversations and transactions remain confidential. Cryptography pro-
vides a solution to this problem, but it has spawned a heated policy debate. U.S.
government wants to restrict the use of data encryption because they fear that crimi-
nals and spies may use the technology to their own advantage. . . . The ability to
have private conversations is in my view an essential democratic right. Democracy
depends on the ability of citizens to share their ideas freely, without fear of monitor-
ing or reprisal; this principle should be upheld as much in cyberspace as it is in the
real world. For the U.S. to restrict the right to use cryptography would be a setback
for democracy—and a victory for Big Brother.” Ron Rivest, “The Case Against Regu-
lating Encryption Technology,” Scientific American 279, no. 4 (1998): 116-117.
27. Tim May, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” posting to the Cypherpunks elec-
tronic mailing list, November 22, 1992.
28. Peter Ludlow, High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), xvii.