Recognizing an unconventional source of a revolutionary technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is honoring one-time movie goddess Hedy Lamarr for her achievements, even as the online activist who set the award in motion warns that the EFF is missing the implications of the actress' invention.

The EFF's Pioneer Award honors Lamarr , 84, for her creation of the concept of frequency hopping - now known as spread-spectrum broadcasting. Lamarr developed the idea during World War II in an attempt to help the US military foil signal jamming that made the use of radio-controlled torpedoes against the Germans impossible. The idea was that while transmissions over a single frequency were easy to block, transmissions jumping from frequency to frequency would be difficult to detect, much less intercept and jam.

"Done right, this stuff is completely secure, so secure you don't need cryptography," said David Hughes , a former Pioneer Award winner and National Science Foundation researcher and wireless communications expert who started the campaign to recognize Lamarr. "The irony is that while EFF is giving Hedy this award, they're completely overlooking the privacy implications of her invention. The Computers, Privacy, and Freedom Conference doesn't even have a single forum on the subject."

But organizers of the conference taking place in Burlingame, California, this week say the issue is moot and that while frequency-hopping technology is currently secure, its inevitable broad proliferation will eventually make information transmitted via spread-spectrum channels as accessible as anything transmitted over analog cellular phones.

"The transmitters and receivers necessary for these communications are still relatively rare," said Bruce Koball, one of the privacy conference organizers and a judge for the Pioneer Award. "Once they've become standard issue, the need for strong encryption will come back in play. And they will become standard issue. Forty companies are already manufacturing them."

Lamarr, who kicked off her film career by appearing nude in the 1933 Czech film Ecstasy, first conceived of her frequency-hopping "Secret Communication System" while she and musician George Antheil were noodling on the piano.

Lamarr's role in developing a technology that has enjoyed widespread military and civilian uses grew out of her personal experiences in Austria before the outbreak of World War II. Married from 1933 to 1937 to an Austrian arms maker, Lamarr got what amounted to a four-year-long education in munitions manufacturing. With Nazi Germany's influence growing in both her husband's business and in her native country, she decided to flee and wound up in Hollywood.

When the United States went to war in 1941, Lamarr wanted to join the anti-Nazi effort by putting her weapons knowledge to work for the National Inventors Council in Washington, DC. She was told to sell war bonds instead. Undaunted, she developed her idea with Antheil and registered it for patent only eight months after Pearl Harbor.

The technology remained unused until the early 1960s and remained classified until 1985, when the Federal Communications Commission made it publicly available. The FCC limited its transmission power to 1 watt, which in turn restricted the scope of usage to local rather than national networks.

Spread-spectrum broadcasting, which sends data at high speeds over unregulated radio frequencies, circumvents traditional phone systems and creates the possibility of cheap, quick Net access. "It's a very democratizing mechanism," said Koball. "It's relatively cheap and will become more so, and the low wattage and hopping frequencies mean it doesn't interfere with fixed-frequency signals."

"I call this the last technology of freedom," Hughes said. "Not only is the access free, but the power needed is so low I don't even have to hook into the power grid to get it."

Johan Helsingius, managing director for EUnet Finland Oy, the major commercial ISP in Finland, and Marc Rotenberg, founder and director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, are also receiving Pioneer Awards. Lamarr will not attend the ceremony; her son Anthony Loder will accept the award.