In the 1970s, research into cryptography began to change. Increasingly, cryptography research was undertaken outside of the military and other intelligence gathering organizations. Authors such as Steven Levy, Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau have described the scientific work on encryption carried out by universities and corporations in the United States, and the policy debates over national security, export controls and individual privacy that followed. However, parallel developments in the UK are less well understood.
The 1970s also saw the start of a program of cryptography research in the UK. Cryptography research was carried out within a number of different organizations, including universities, the civil service, and in industry. Later, as the popularity of the Internet grew in the 1990s, tensions emerged between concerns over individual privacy and the viability of electronic commerce, on the one hand, and the law enforcement and national security on the other. This resulted in a controversy, consisting of a series of parliamentary debates, official consultations and prolonged attempts to enact legislation.
Using documentary analysis and qualitative interviews, details about how each research site designed and constructed encryption technologies has been uncovered. Examination of the practises employed at each of these sites has revealed a divergent set of methods, operations and goals. Subsequently, a picture of a set of technologies has emerged that, although ostensibly designed with security and the inhibition of surveillance and monitoring in mind, exhibit divergence in the range of localized practises that produced and sustained them. Furthermore, the ways in which cryptography research influenced the subsequent policy debates has been outlined. This has revealed some of the techniques employed by scientists to modify their research practices in order to produce viable policy arguments, and in turn, to become more effective political actors.