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Encryption Security Your Rights Online

Greplaw Interviews Phil Zimmermann 111

Posted by michael from the code-warrior dept.
LawGeek writes "The venerable GrepLaw crew has struck again, this time with Editor Mikael Pawlo interviewing PGP author and all-around encryption expert Phil Zimmermann. Pawlo discussed a number of topics with Zimmerman, including the current state of encryption export laws, DRM, and activism against erosion of privacy both in the U.S. and internationally. The interview is here."
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Greplaw Interviews Phil Zimmermann More

Greplaw Interviews Phil Zimmermann

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  • The interview is encrypted! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And I don't have the key! This will take decades to crack. Stupid PGP.

    • Re:The interview is encrypted! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      fortunatly, It is encrypted with rot 26 :D
      • Actually, they rot13-encrypted it. And then, to make double sure that the encryption was effective, they rot13-encrypted that. So the only way to read the actual interview is to doubly-decrypt it using the inverse of rot13.

        I'd describe how this is done, but the margins of this message aren't wide enough ...

  • fingerprint scanners in police cars (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AyeFly ( 242460 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @02:35PM (#6139381)
    Whats wrong with that? It might have prevented the dispute in court over driver's license photos and muslim women wearing veils...with a fingerprint, you dont need picture ID, and its more reliable.

    • Re:fingerprint scanners in police cars (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes, but then Big Brother will have everyone's fingerprints. That is more of an invasion of privacy than having my picture (especially since they would demand that too, you know, for carding at supermarkets and whatnot).

    • Re:fingerprint scanners in police cars (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      But is it just checking against a database of existing fingerprints, or does it then add you to the database once it has you scanned? And what about the next step in forensics, DNA? Would you like DNA scanners in police cars?

    • Re:fingerprint scanners in police cars (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dr Reducto ( 665121 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @02:41PM (#6139404) Journal
      ...But technology can fail. Technology can also be "hacked". Technology should only be used as a supplement and taken wih a grain of salt when accuracy absolutely matters. Like the Naval saying: Satellites fail, compasses do not.

    • Re:fingerprint scanners in police cars (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nounderscores ( 246517 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @02:46PM (#6139417)
      The difference is that you don't leave your photograph on every door handle and toilet seat you touch... or at least I don't.

      ______________________________
      The Spiders are coming [e-sheep.com]

    • Re:fingerprint scanners in police cars (Score:5, Interesting)

      by csguy314 ( 559705 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @03:18PM (#6139496) Homepage
      It might have prevented the dispute in court over driver's license photos and muslim women wearing veils...with a fingerprint, you dont need picture ID, and its more reliable.

      [off-topic]
      I was just discussing the issue of this Muslim woman today. As a Muslim I think this woman is doing something kind of dumb. There is nothing in the Quran about covering a women's face. During prayers, in fact, her face must not be covered. So I haven't a clue where they get the idea that they need to wear a veil over their face. And this is specifically for a piece of identification. How the hell are you supposed to identify someone that's covering their face? In fact I've heard suggestions that maybe bin Laden escaped the US in Afghanistan by posing as a veiled woman. It's not beyond comprehension.
      But if this woman refuses to be identified, then perhaps she should not be allowed the responsibility of driving. It makes it possible for her to abuse the system and others to abuse her. She could claim some other person wearing a veil caused an accident that she caused, or it's possible someone wears a veil and does something specifically to incriminate her. It's a very unnecessary complication.
      [/off-topic] That being said, fingerprints are a bad idea. As another poster mentioned, you leave fingerprints everywhere. And just having them on file and being in the wrong place can make you suspect in something which you have no idea about. It gives far more opportunity for abuse by authorities, and it's naive to think they won't be more abusive the more opportunity you give them.

      • Veils and Driver's Licences. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by pcwhalen ( 230935 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (nelahwcp)> on Saturday June 07, 2003 @03:55PM (#6139636) Journal
        Gosh this is offtopic but here goes....

        There is no right to drive in the US. It is a privilege imparted to citizens of the various states by the state's government. As such, the state may regulate conduct and licencing with regard to driving.

        Too bad, so sad. No veils if the state says "no." The Supreme Court has held on numereous occassions that states have the right to protect their citizens. Where religous freedom contradicts state edicts, the SC looks to see if the edict is a right or a priviledge. Where it is only a priviledge, the state always wins.

        Driving is a privilege. Enjoy it.
        • Actually, I have the right to drive my car on any road that I own. Unfortunately, I don't own many roads.
      • And just having them on file and being in the wrong place can make you suspect in something which you have no idea about.

        Just being in the wrong place can make you a suspect, holmes.
      • This woman converted 2 years ago. I have the feeling she was anoyingly 'devout' in whatever her religion was before. I wonder where exactly she put her interpertation of Islam together from. As I understand it, most places that insist on veils also don't let women drive.
    • > with a fingerprint, you dont need picture ID, and its more reliable.

      The problem with any kind of biometric ID is that it's only as secure as the database that it checks against. Security based solely on biometric ID is very brittle -- because it's allegedly so "strong", once broken (by hacking into the database, by using someone else's eyeball) you have massive and nearly undetectable breaches of security.

      The best security systems are not brittle. And for driver's licenses, photo ID does provide appr

    • Re:fingerprint scanners in police cars (Score:5, Insightful)

      by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @04:11PM (#6139688) Journal
      While driving down the street, the police can't look over and identify you based on your fingerprints... Even with fingerprint scanners in police cars, photos are needed.

      with a fingerprint, you dont need picture ID, and its more reliable.

      Yes, but the potential for abuse is much higher. Walking down the street some nights, the police think you look suspicious. They don't have any reason to take you in, but they could fingerprint you and find out your entire history in an instant.

      Also, that would mean the police would have MANY more fingerprints on file. It's really just one step away from police finger printing every person in the country.

      What's wrong with it? Well, it's a matter of opinion. If you believe in police states, nothing is wrong with it at all. If you believe even slightly in privacy, there is much wrong with it...
    • Aside from the general tinfoil-hat paranoia, there are two large problems:
      1. It's not as reliable as you'd think. There was a slashdot story a while ago about a study of the most common fingerprint readers on the market and the conclusions were quite horrifying. For one thing, it was found that the majority of them could be easily faked with easy-to-obtain materials like gummy bears and scotch tape.
      2. If someone were to lift your prints off something you touched, and then commit identity theft, there's no easy
    • "it might prevent the dispute in court" is a poor reason for anything.

      Executing all muslims "might have prevented the dispute in court" as well. Do you advocate that?

  • from the article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nounderscores ( 246517 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @02:38PM (#6139391)
    # But you donâ(TM)t code any more?

    I havenâ(TM)t written code in many years. I am active in policy space rather writing code, doing a lot of public speaking. There is a lot of need for activism now in the shadow of the Patriot Act.

    Interesting. I would have thought that hammering out the bugs in the law would have been the oldest form of coding.

    ___________________________________
    The Spiders are coming. [e-sheep.com]
    • You're right. It's the hardest code to debug. The United States Code, I mean.

      If you take a body of 100 Senators and the House with several hundred, most with no experience in law, writing laws every day, it makes for buggy code. Even when they mean well.

      Think about if you had the in-house lawyers writing your programs. Think they'd run?

      That's why you get laws about encryption that treats it as a munition. Minds that do not understand a subject crafting a law in a way that does not adequately deal wi
      • If you take a body of 100 Senators and the House with several hundred, most with no experience in law, writing laws every day, it makes for buggy code. Even when they mean well.

        I think most of them have far too much experience in law. Virtually all the senators were layweres or went to law school. Sure, there are a couple millionaire investment bankers, or millionare heart surgeaons, but they're a minority.

        The house of reps has a lo more diversity, but just as much (or more) of them are career politic

  • Greplaw: In the spirit of Aimee Deep . . . (Score:3, Funny)

    by Nix0n ( 649693 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @02:55PM (#6139446)
    So Phil, what is your position on the question of balancing national security concerns against the civil rights of said nation's citizens, in the context of allowing citizens to use uncrackable encryption ?

    OMG! That is like the COOLEST QUESTION ! Wow, I'm like totally into law and stuff, and like did you look at my boobies? No, they're not real! OMG, as if!

  • Zimmerman's contradictory opinions (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geekee ( 591277 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @03:04PM (#6139466)
    When asked about encryption technology, he thought it was great that a person could control who read his data. When asked about DRM, he said it was bad that a person could restrict who reads his data. Or does Zimmerman have a bias against companies? A person should be free to encrypt data, but not a company? Or is is, you should be able to encrypt data unless you're selling it? DRM is encryption. I don't see why this guy thinks some people have the right to use it while others don't, just because he thinks it's bad for society somehow when some people use it. He didn't care that terrorists were using PGP, but was concerned about the music industry using DRM. That I find disturbing.

    • Re:Zimmerman's contradictory opinions (Score:5, Informative)

      by mpawlo ( 260572 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @03:20PM (#6139500) Homepage
      That is a good observation I should have made myself during the interview. However, I never posed a question in this respect - my mistake. Reading only from the transcript you may not reach the conclusion you suggest. Mr Zimmermann spoke of both DRM and encryption as problems for the future access to archives. If he hosts double-standards the way you suggests regarding DRM and enryption, I can not tell.

      I do not think Mr Zimmermann is corporate-hostile in general, though, since he makes his living selling his knowledge to companies striving to protect their data.

      Regards,

      Mikael

    • Two different problems. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dmaxwell ( 43234 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @03:23PM (#6139510)
      Email encryption is intended to keep third parties out of private communication. With PGP nothing stops the other side from divulging his end of the conversation to others. Sure some corporate mail clients may try to mark mails unprintable, unsaveable and what not but that won't defeat a digital camera or even a Bic and piece of paper. Encryption just allows Bob and Alice to have a conversation with reasonable assurance Eve isn't listening in.

      DRM is something else altogether. DRM is intended to allow a sender to control what a recipient can do with information. In this case, Alice is trying to use encryption to mark information for Bob's eyes only (on Bob's Alice approved OS or Bob's Alice approved player) regardless of how Bob feels about it. This is absurd. If Bob can see it then Bob can copy it. DRM's only true effect is to create varying degrees of inconvienience for Bob.

      Is not at all hypocritical to favor technological means for privacy while being opposed to technological means on control. Email encryption: Privacy. DRM: Control.

      • Re:Two different problems. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Dr Reducto ( 665121 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @04:12PM (#6139693) Journal
        You are correct sir. Even if you have theoretically unbreakable encryption, or time consuming to break encryption, it is always breakable. There is the human factor. A computer to brute-force encryption algorithms costs millions, but a $1000 bribe can be just as effecive if you have a disgruntled employee who does not take security seriously.
      • Good Point. However, DRM is a more general form of PGP. Saying you shouldn't be allowed to control what the end user does with data you send him shows a lack of respect for intellectual property. Legally, I can send someone data under NDA. Why shouldn't I have a tool to help make sure the NDA isn't broken? Why limit encryption technology in such a manner? He opened pandora's box. If he really believes in freedom, he shouldn't be trying to tell people how they can use encryption technology. That's fundamenta

    • Re:Zimmerman's contradictory opinions (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Rambo ( 2730 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @03:24PM (#6139513)
      When asked about DRM, he said it was bad that a person could restrict who reads his data. Or does Zimmerman have a bias against companies?

      I think you're missing the point. The companies utilizing DRM are using it to prevent you from making full use of the content which you purchase. This is in contrast to you encrypting mail which is simply to keep spying eyes from peering into your private life.
      However, I did have one concern about a wholesale use of encryption for personal affairs. Suppose I keep a personal journal and I use encryption; who's to say that I won't get run over by a truck, thereby effectively locking that information forever? Ideally I'd like to think that my grandchildren and so forth could learn and appreciate me as a person by reading it when I'm gone. You can't really write down the password as you don't want it falling into the wrong hands (i.e. government), but there's a terrible risk that it may never be readable in the future. Ditto for personal email, which can also be important to future generations.
      • Easy, make keys for your children, and encrypt to them.
      • Don't worry about your grandkids being unable to read your texts encripted with current tech.

        Kid: Hey look, gramp's journal. Hmm... encrypted with PGP, let's see, it will take my 13Ghz Dragon about 1 day to crack it. Or I could recruit some of my buds and grid it up with them and crack it in an hour. OK, here we go, let's see what was so important that it had to be encrypted.
        ==========

        *CRASH* (door shatters)

        Cop: Homeland Security! Nobody move! You are under arrest under Patriot Act 5/DMCA 3. Come with u
      • I do not know if there are any working models to go by, but I have heard about the use of timestamped encryption, that would somehow unencrypt the data after a certain date. Unfortunately, I cannot remember where I saw that...

    • Re:Zimmerman's contradictory opinions (Score:5, Insightful)

      by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @03:25PM (#6139515) Homepage Journal
      It's not contradictory at all.

      Encryption, the way PGP works, is a way to prevent third parties from getting at data you don't want them to.

      DRM is a way to prevent the user from using data that was given to him in "unapproved" ways.

      Once you get an e-mail and read it with PGP, you can do anything you want with it. You can copy-paste it into a Word document, you can forward it to a million-member Yahoo mailing list, anything you want. DRM is fundamentally different in that it's not for protecting against unauthorized use by third parties, but for protecting against unauthorized use by the person who supposedly owns the data (or a license).

      • Re:Zimmerman's contradictory opinions (Score:5, Informative)

        by Jade E. 2 ( 313290 ) <slashdot@perlstor m . n et> on Saturday June 07, 2003 @04:20PM (#6139723) Homepage
        Once you get an e-mail and read it with PGP, you can do anything you want with it. You can copy-paste it into a Word document, you can forward it to a million-member Yahoo mailing list, anything you want

        Actually, PGP (the new-ish versions, anyways) has an option when encrypting to only allow the decrypted message to be displayed in PGP's 'Secure Viewer', which prevents you from copying or saving the information (and, optionally, displays it in a grey on slightly-lighter-grey color scheme to try to prevent Tempest attacks). It also has other properties, such as preventing the message from being written to swap/page files (and windows hibernation files).

        Of course, you can still just re-type it yourself, but it is distinctly DRM-like in that it requires extra effort to defeat the security, while not really offering any more protection. Of course, the difference is that when receiving a PGP message, the recipient generally *wants* the data to remain secure, and in DRM's case the recipient generally doesn't.

      • Further, it's there to prevent access by a licensee that the licensee may be entitled to.

        In Australia, for example, we have a limited set of rights in relation to Computer Software in the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) [digitalerection.com]; preventing a licensee from exercising rights by encryption is, in effect, trying to subvert the operation of the law; as much as DRM companies would like to think so, they do not have a monopoly in determining how their products can/shall/will be used.

    • "A person should be free to encrypt data, but not a company? "

      I think the objection is not that companies encrypt data as part of DRM, its that the law prohibits you from decrypting without authorization from the owner with DRM.

      Protection, it seems, that is not available to individuals using encryption.

  • The single greatest moral of the story (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ShatteredDream ( 636520 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @03:20PM (#6139502) Homepage
    Is that the line between law enforcement officers as peace officers and law enforcement officers as oppressors is very thin in most situations. The federal law enforcement apparatus is slowly beginning to aspire to KGB-level power over the population.

    Look at Waco for instance. I'm not a fan of cults like the Branch Davidians, but the use of military-grade hardware like small tanks against a compound that is guarded by a bunch of yokels with at best automatic weapons is a great cause for concern. What most people don't know is that Waco was so badly screwed up that it had to be deliberate. It is not a conspiracy theory to say that the FBI and other agencies wanted to make an example out of them because they had something like 6 months to a year where David Koresh walked everday to wal-mart for supplies. I come from a federal law enforcement family and both my parents agree that in light of how many opportunities they had to NOT make an explosive situation it was literally criminal what the feds did. Same goes for Ruby Ridge.

    The majority of police working in these areas don't care about your freedom or your privacy anymore. If they did they'd have given up on bullshit like the Clipper Chip and export regulations. We live in a society in which it is not feasible to keep our technology under wraps. It would be trivial for Al Qaeda to smuggle PGP out of our country; all they'd have to do is get someone inside our country, buy a single copy and send it from a public library to the Middle East.

    We can only lose by listening to these security chicken littles because if we did everything we could to make our country secure, we'd resemble a slightly right-wing version of the Soviet Union. There would be no public internet access, no freedom of mobility, no right to keep and bear arms (which saves more lives than all cops in America combined), no right to security in your house and person, no freedom of association, and probably no property rights either. I won't live like that and I consider anyone who would to be worthy of death. They aren't human and because they reduce themselves so low they are a disgrace to our species. Not that I advocate murdering them, but rather I only laugh my ass off at them when they get hurt or killed. Good riddance, we need more people that won't change their lives to accomodate the terrorists, whether they're associates of Al Qaeda, have a General Services rank or call themselves Representative or Senator.

    Government can't protect you preemptively, that is the indirect moral of this story. The police can pick up the pieces and get justice, but that's usually about it. Here's a novel thought, let's legalize assassinating terrorists. But this was never about terrorism and national (or is it fatherland) security, it was about big government justifying its Cold War level of control over the people. The worst parts of Communism aren't dead, they're festering in the White House and most of the law and order Republican types can't see that they've already lost. Bob Barr was kicked out because he had the audacity to call out Bush on issues like TIPS where he said, "this program smacks of the very fascist and communist governments that we have faught for so long."

    So it's not healthy to be a true patriot and political traditionalist in America anymore. You call for a modern form of the government we started out with (in other words, nothing like slavery) and you're called idealistic, short-sighted and soft-headed. The irony of it is that the true hard-headed people have always advocated limited government and a simultaneously isolationist and Machiavellian foreign policy. We'd be a lot more secure if we minded our own business and made people pay handsomely in blood for every single violent transgression against us. For example we'd have fewer problems with Saudi-funded terrorists if after every such attack against us, the CIA sent its SOG commandos into Saudia Arabia and blew up a few civilian targets. You want respect in war and politics? Show that if you have to choose between doing the right thing and surviving that the former never gets in the way of the latter.
    • right to keep and bear arms (which saves more lives than all cops in America combined)

      That's a new one on me. Maybe you should check your facts -- looks to me like the U.S.A. has the highest murder rate out of any country in the world. Other countries that don't have gun control seem to be able to keep their citizens from dying some other way, I guess.

  • philzimmermanrocks (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 07, 2003 @03:41PM (#6139585)
    -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
    Version: PGP 8.0.2

    qANQR1DDDQQJAwKQORxFJ2eXpGDSwC8BX+3gT6C1eWdjGZcE B0 lQ3KQ186ZcTNs1
    Fv09JDOd3KLv1TXDs/bPdGLh5NQjjn8LK/ B9S0R1nOKNzYKi/M V1REVh9Yffffuy
    H9g30N+9CSAovfMziE6m4CY61Gt+JmYfdm +XnP8fTdPKMCHfCp XdHxzLpflgYGJX
    5SHtv5A80W34/A0y8ML/g+dhI4Kpfh1vm9 dOmdYGDyaBB1oAIx DUW2PxmJn4Zu8T
    CbPtlL2BfHayS69CAMPB2713nY5BC1x0El HCcay5ATZTsxZNeC pxFWc8Nnr3yUJ3
    MemlfqeANC5g8VaboKZa09BYgawx2Q==
    =H5qE
    -----END PGP MESSAGE-----
    • I doubt that most people will get that joke to it's full extent. :)

    • Yes, this is actually funny in some way... mostly that somebody posted it this way. Anyway, the point to it was that you had to decrypt it in PGP, and that the passphrase was the subject line. If you tried that and got the "no pgp data found" message, it's because you forgot to remove the spaces that /. adds in between long strings. Below is the messsage exactly was decrypted, complete with an error in the link syntax. Have a good one...

      ***[6/8/2003 11:52:29 AM] Cipher: AES256
      ***[6/8/2003 11:52:29 AM] BEGI
      • I thought the part of the point of ascii-armor is that it makes the spaces not matter. But, as you say, they do appear to matter, at least with the version of gpg that I use. :(
  • I've had PGP for quite awhile, but it's not very useful to me for sending e-mail because I don't know anyone else who uses it. I coudln't imagine trying to explain to my computer-challenged friends how encryption works and why it should always be used.

    Even if a standard encryption system for e-mail was created it's highly likely the government would require it to have several back doors.

  • Terrorism and PGP (Score:4, Insightful)

    by alpharoid ( 623463 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @05:56PM (#6140038)
    Following the September 11-attacks, it was claimed in some reports that the U.S. authorities investigated if PGP was used to co-ordinate the attacks. Do you regret the decision to release PGP as freeware?
    I don't really understand when people bring the subject of PGP being used by terrorists, and how this should weigh against the program. PGP is just a tool that makes encrytion easy for the regular user, and it's not something that suddenly brought encryption to terrorists. There has always been a very simple and effective encryption tool for strong cryptography, called the one-time pad.

    I'm just saying that PGP has done nothing to facilitate terrorism. If terrorists really wanted encryption, they could have used it at any point, regardless of PGP's existence. And anyway, historically it seems that terrorists never really used electronic encryption for most of their planning.

    • Re:Terrorism and PGP (Score:4, Insightful)

      by blibbleblobble ( 526872 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @07:44PM (#6140381)
      "I don't really understand when people bring the subject of PGP being used by terrorists, and how this should weigh against the program."

      If anything, PGP makes life more difficult for the terrorist, unless we're suggesting that it's a good idea that potential targets use plaintext email when whey're planning their journeys, emailing hotels, etc.

      "Blah blah blah, did I mention the [famous person's name] is visiting next thursday, blah blah.

      I don't need to encrypt this do I? The government says that encryption is a bad thing.

      I'll just email the rental company and check our boss' car, then plan a route on Autoroute Express and email it to the chicago office. No need to worry about security, I'll email to let the guy meeting him know the license-place to look out for.

      Encryption? What's that? The news says that only bad people use encryption. I'd best send all this information plain-text.

    • Italian terrorist group "Red Brigades" militants responsible for the assasination of law professor Marco Biagi are said to have used encryption to store sensitive data on their Palm handhelds. Italian press mentioned something like symmetric key but nothing about key strenght (but our press is completely clueless when it comes to IT and some tech crime specialized policemen don't miss a chance to spread FUD). Sicilian Mafia bosses on the run have messengers carry carefully ironed and folded paper sheets to

  • Need for telephone encryption (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Johnny Pissoff ( 674214 ) <johnny_pissoff2003&yahoo,com> on Saturday June 07, 2003 @06:22PM (#6140110) Homepage
    I'm surprised that the interview made no mention of the use of encryption in telephone communications. Recently Bruce Schneier in his Crypto-gram newsletter [counterpane.com] pointed out that based on the US governments report on wiretapping that telephone encryption was rarely encountered and even when it was encountered it never presented a problem to the government in obtaining the cleartext of such encrypted communications.

    It seems there is a real need both for strong, open-source cryptographic solutions for VoIp applications and some kind of open-source hardware for telephone communications. Open source because presumably the problem with current telephony encryption is that its closed source implementation has made it easy for the government to crack, as Schneier points out.

    Since PZ once wrote an PGPfone for encrypted VoIP communications I'd really like to hear his opinion on this topic.

  • Fingerprints not absolutely reliable (Score:3, Insightful)

    by HermanAB ( 661181 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @06:30PM (#6140142)
    As govs store more fingerprints, the odds of making identity mistakes increase enormously. So far, nobody cared about the relibility (or lack thereof) of fingerprint systems, since only criminals are fingerprinted. Once everybody is on file, it is sure to be a whole different story. If you are living on the west coast and gets picked up for a murder on the east coast, it may be possible to explain it away, but what if you live in the same neighborhood as the victim? So, eventually, all the information that is stored, will become full of entropy and noise and will be useless as a law enforcement tool.

  • Boo! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Feztaa ( 633745 ) on Sunday June 08, 2003 @01:33AM (#6141535) Homepage
    # Could [open source licenses like the GPL] have been an alternative for PGP instead of making it freeware?

    There is a place for products under different licenses. There is a place for products under the GNU GPL, also cryptographic products. However, GNU GPL is not enough for everyoneâ(TM)s needs. Some software needs to be sold for profit. Some software can not depend on hobby-programming conducted on weekends and other spare-time by programmers having other day-jobs. There is a place for that. But PGP needs more focused development than that.

    I'd really like to know how he feels about the GnuPG project, in that case.

    It also kind of bothers me that he seems to think that the GPL prevents you from selling your code.

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