Neat!
NSA just released a (redacted) declassified 1997 history of the development of DES, responding to a 2009 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from John a. Young at Crytpome http://cryptome.org.
Fascinating reading!
https://cryptome.org/2021/04/Joseph-Meyer-IEEE-1977.pdf
It points out that DES was the very first time NSA worked with anyone else (National Bureau of Standard, NBS, the former name of NIST) on crypto development. It also includes discussion of the controversy over possible backdoors in DES. Further discussion goes into teh public development of public key crypto by Ron RIvest, and even mentions a paper co-authored by "graduate student Whit Diffield."
Meat of the report is about whether ITAR could be used to control release of crypto information.
Important read for those in the world of Crypto. Quite interesting for all of us in infosec.
Craig
