Il 09/06/21 07:59, J.C. DE MARTIN ha scritto:
Philip Zimmermann
*PGP Marks 30th Anniversary*
6 June 2021
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the release of PGP 1.0.
It was on this day in 1991 that Pretty Good Privacy was uploaded to the Internet. I had sent it to a couple of my friends for distribution the day before. This set in motion a decade of struggle to end the US export controls on strong cryptographic software. After PGP version 1.0 was released, a number of volunteer engineers came forward and we made many improvements. In September 1992 we released PGP 2.0 in ten foreign languages, running on several different platforms, upgraded with new functionality, including the distinctive trust model that enabled PGP to become the most widely used method of email encryption.
I became the target of a criminal investigation for violating the Arms Export Control Act by allowing PGP to spread around the world. This further propelled PGP's popularity. The government dropped the investigation in early 1996, but the policy debate raged on, until the US export restrictions finally collapsed in 2000. PGP ignited the decade of the Crypto Wars, resulting in all the western democracies dropping their restrictions on the use of strong cryptography. It was a storied and thrilling decade, and a triumph of activism for the right to have a private conversation.
I wanted PGP to be used for human rights applications. I wanted it to spread all over the world, especially to places where people needed protection from their own governments. But I couldn't say that out loud during the criminal investigation, because it would help the prosecutor prove intent.
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Continua qui: https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/PGP_30th/
Grazie. Particolarmente (almeno per me) significativo: " The most dramatic PGP stories came from outside the US. PGP helped enable the safe evacuation of 8000 civilians from mortal danger during the Kosovo conflict. While attending the 2014 National Cybersecurity Hall of Fame ceremony, a guy from the HUMINT community approached me to thank me because he said he had some colleagues who were alive today because of PGP. Human rights groups documenting war crimes in Guatemala, protecting witnesses from reprisals from the military. Human rights workers in the Balkans. Political resistance in Burma in the 1990s. There were so many stories like that over the years. In 2004, Robert Morris Sr., who had retired from NSA, told me that when PGP first appeared on the scene along with its source code, the NSA was particularly worried that the source code would show a lot of people how to develop strong public key crypto software, and the skills would proliferate. Here we are, three decades later, and strong crypto is everywhere. ..." rob