SPECIAL REPORT: REBUILDING THE FUTURE
ENCRYPTION
We may never know whether the September 11 hijackers used Phil Zimmermann's PGP encryption software to communicate with their co-conspirators. But they could have, and indeed if they had any sense they did. After all, PGP is designed to offer anyone virtually unbreakable email privacy, and Zimmermann - backed by crypto-anarchist cypherpunks - has fought long and hard to keep it available to all. Now his phone rings constantly: Everyone wants to know whether he's sorry for potentially aiding and abetting the enemy.
Wired: Are you sorry?
Zimmermann: Well, I would feel bad if I discovered they used PGP. But I would not feel guilty about developing PGP. I did review my opinions about this in the wake of the tragedy. But it quickly led to the same conclusions the public debate in the 1990s did: that strong crypto is important for maintaining democratic institutions. Society is better off with strong crypto than without it. We had the luxury of conducting that debate in a peacetime setting that allowed us to make a rational decision. We didn't make a rash decision under the emotional pressure of the moment that may lead us to a bad decision.
Some have compared cypherpunks to the pro-gun lobby: Both use the arguments of civil liberties to promote the use of potentially dangerous self-defense tools. Politically, the main difference is the pro-gun lobby is huge and the cypherpunks are few. Guns survived Columbine; can the cypherpunks survive September 11?
As time passes and cooler heads prevail in government, I don't think the cypherpunks in particular will have trouble. I do find some of the cypherpunks a bit too confrontational for my taste. I've always regarded cypherpunk as an unfortunate name; it has a kind of black-leather sort of disaffected-radical sound to it. They need better packaging. Even so, our conclusions are the same - that we're better off as a society with strong crypto than with crypto backdoors.
The risk of a few bad guys using PGP might seem acceptable if it's being used mostly by regular folk to protect their privacy: the greater-good argument. But despite a decade of evangelism and your technical work to make strong crypto available to all, few people use PGP today. Why is that?
It's true: Only a small amount of the email in the world is encrypted. Almost all of that is PGP, but I'm still embarrassed by how little it is. I think the biggest reason is ease of use. There are also a lot of people who don't particularly care; they just don't think of email the same as they do of postal mail with envelopes. But I'm content with the decision I made. I want to make it clear in Wired that I have not changed my principles. At no time have I ever felt guilty about developing PGP.
All things PGP can be found at www.philzimmermann.com.
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