Phil Zimmermann's decision in 1991 to release his email encryption software, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), made him an eminent public figure and the target of a three-year government anti crypto witch-hunt that inadvertently helped spread PGP across the globe. Now he's left PGP, the company that he founded after the Justice Department backed down, and joined Hush Communications, provider of a secure email service called HushMail, as chief cryptographer.
"I think privacy will be to the coming decade what the ecology movement was to the 1970s," he says. But do people who have nothing to hide really need to worry? "With that line of reasoning, why do we need search warrants for the police? Why do we need envelopes for our letters? Why do you need a lawyer present when the police question you? It's damaging to our society to even make that argument. Everyone has something to hide."
Zimmermann acknowledges that limits to encryption should existâ€"preventing, say, CIA operatives from sending encrypted secrets outside the agencyâ€""but for ordinary people in ordinary jobs, we need more privacy for employees. Often you hear arguments being made that if you write a letter on company equipment, the company should be able to read the letter. But were you to write a letter to your wife, using a company ballpoint pen, would the company have a right to read that letter? Is the ownership of equipment relevant to privacy? I don't think so."
