When mathematician Whitfield Diffie tried to find out what was going on in the world of cryptography, he kept hitting a brick wall; the NSA had gobbled it all up, and wasn’t letting anything loose. Then he met Martin Hellman, and forever changed the course of public cryptography. Part 3 of 4.

Sources for this episode

• Best book ever! Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government–Saving Privacy in the Digital Age
• An article in the Stanford newsletter with a photo of Diffie and Hellman, circa 1977