perm filename WD.NS[NS,MRC] blob
sn#314830 filedate 1977-11-03 generic text, type T, neo UTF8
BC-CODE 2takes 1,000
By MALCOLM W. BROWNE
c.1977 N.Y. Times News Service
NEW YORK - Computer scientists and mathematicians whose research touches on
secret codes say they have been subjected by the National Security Agency to
growing harrassment and the threat of sanctions or even prosecution for
publishing articles about their work.
The scientists, some working for universities, some for private industry
and some for the government, charge that research in this country faces a muted
but growing threat from the NSA - the government's highest authority on secret
codes.
NSA tactics, they say, may eventually mean that a scientist working outside
the government could suddenly be informed his work had been classified
officially as secret, or he could be constrained from participating in
international professional meetings.
Norman Boardman, spokesman for the NSA, told The New York Times that
neither he nor any other employee of the agency could comment in any way on the
accusations made by the scientists.
Complaining scientists, lawyers for scientific institutions and government
experts agree that laws covering such potential constraints are ambiguous. But
because of the vagueness of the current legal position, NSA threats and pressure
must be taken seriously, they assert.
Scientists said in interviews that threats levelled against them by
employees of the NSA have included the possibility of official action to get
research grants canceled or criminal prosecution for violation of security laws.
A source within the National Science Foundation, a federal agency that
underwrites many research programs by private organizations and individuals,
said his organization was being subjected to increasing ''sysematic,
bureaucratic sniping'' from NSA with a view to bringing certain kinds of
research under NSA control.
The informant, who requested that his identity not be disclosed, said that
there was a real danger of intimidating a large segment of the private American
scientific community if NSA pressure were not resisted.
Such allegations have been simmering in the scientific press for the last
six months, but the controversy was brought to a boil by a symposium on
information theory held last week at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
Among the scientists who presented papers at the meeting was a group from
Stanford University headed by Dr. Martin E. Hellman and an associate, Whitfield
Diffie.
The Stanford group had been concentrating its studies on a kind of
mathematical problem known as the Nondeterministic Polynomial Complete Problem
(N-P Complete).
(An example of such a problem would be the fitting of several forms of
varying shapes and sizes into a larger form, with no excess and nothing left
over).
The N-P Complete problem's special interest to computer scientists is that
at this point no computer can be programmed to solve it. Hellman and his
associates have therefore proposed it as a device for ''locking'' data stored in
the memory banks of computers against unauthorized use or theft.
''The right to privacy of the American citizen is what this is all about,''
he said.
However, the N-P Complete problem could also be used as a system for
devising secret communications codes that, Hellman contends, would also be
virtually impossible to break, even by giant intelligence organizations,
including the National Security Agency.
The implication, Hellman and others said, was that any government, private
organization or individual could devise and use a code that would be immune to
eavesdropping, whether from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Soviet Union's
counterpart the KGB, or any other group.
This, say the experts involved, created anxiety within the United States
intelligence community in an interview, a senior government intelligence
official described the issues raised by the Hellman team as ''extremely
serious'' to the national security interests of the country.
The Stanford work and related projects by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and others, he said, could enable foreign powers to develop virtually
impenetrable command-and-control military communications systems.
Most computer scientists and mathematicians in the United States are
members of the Institute of Electric and Electronic Engineers, which publishes
their papers and distributes them to countries abroad, including the Soviet
Union.
Several weeks before the Cornell conference, the Institute received a
letter from one of its members, Joseph A. Meyer, who is listed, well-placed
scientists say, in the National Security Agency directory as an employee.
The letter warned the Institute that publication and distribution of
scientific papers by the Stanford team and other groups planning to participate
in the Cornell conference could result in prosecution under the 1954 Munitions
Control Act, known in its current revision as the Arms Export Control Act.
Lawyers of the institute studied Meyer's letter and the law itself, and
finally concluded that they were within the law in publishing the Stanford
research. A similar view was taken by lawyers representing Stanford University
and officials interviewed by The New York Times in the Department of Commerce,
the agency responsible for issuing licenses for exported technology.
But Meyer's letter cast a pall over the Cornell conference, participants
said, and several postdoctoral students were dissuaded from presenting their own
papers.
''I have tenure at Stanford,'' Hellman said, ''and if the NSA should decide
to push us in court, Stanford would back me. But for a student hoping to begin a
career, it would not be so pleasant to go job hunting with three years of
litigation hanging over your head.''
Boardman, the security agency spokesman, denied that the NSA had directed
any employee to bring pressure on Hellman or the others.
But an informant in the National Science Foundation said the letter from
Meyer to the engineering institute was merely one of a number of similarly
threatening letters that had been sent to scientists and their organizations by
known employees of the security agency.
''I have also had private conversations with NSA,'' he said, ''in which
they have threatened all kinds of things, including getting research grants cut
off to offending scientists. Many of these threats have absolutely no legal
basis, of course, but the target scientists are not lawyers, and they don't know
where they stand.''