[NetBehaviour] Why I Wrote PGP.

marc marc.garrett at furtherfield.org
Sat Dec 23 14:54:01 CET 2006


Why I Wrote PGP.

Philip Zimmermann.

Part of the Original 1991 PGP User's Guide (updated in 1999)

It's personal. It's private. And it's no one's business but yours. You 
may be planning a political campaign, discussing your taxes, or having a 
secret romance. Or you may be communicating with a political dissident 
in a repressive country. Whatever it is, you don't want your private 
electronic mail (email) or confidential documents read by anyone else. 
There's nothing wrong with asserting your privacy. Privacy is as 
apple-pie as the Constitution.

The right to privacy is spread implicitly throughout the Bill of Rights. 
But when the United States Constitution was framed, the Founding Fathers 
saw no need to explicitly spell out the right to a private conversation. 
That would have been silly. Two hundred years ago, all conversations 
were private. If someone else was within earshot, you could just go out 
behind the barn and have your conversation there. No one could listen in 
without your knowledge. The right to a private conversation was a 
natural right, not just in a philosophical sense, but in a 
law-of-physics sense, given the technology of the time.

But with the coming of the information age, starting with the invention 
of the telephone, all that has changed. Now most of our conversations 
are conducted electronically. This allows our most intimate 
conversations to be exposed without our knowledge. Cellular phone calls 
may be monitored by anyone with a radio. Electronic mail, sent across 
the Internet, is no more secure than cellular phone calls. Email is 
rapidly replacing postal mail, becoming the norm for everyone, not the 
novelty it was in the past.

more...
http://wapurl.co.uk/?HS9UZC3




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