Fw: FC: Phil Zimmermann leaves NSI, says PGP source should be published

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        Forwarded by   k l a u s   e.   w e r n e r   |   kew@pobox.com
        

        Original Message Begins ----------------------->
        
        From:    Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
        To:      politech@politechbot.com
        Date:    20. Feb 2001 17:46:01
        Subject: FC: Phil Zimmermann leaves NSI,
        says PGP source should be published

        
*******
Here's a photo:
http://www.mccullagh.org/image/6/phil-zimmermann.html
*******

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,41896,00.html

    PGP Creator Bolts to Hush
    by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com)
    8:25 a.m. Feb. 20, 2001 PST

    Phil Zimmermann, the legendary creator of e-mail and file-encryption
    program PGP, will become the chief cryptographer for Web-based e-mail
    company Hush Communications.

    Citing differences with Network Associates -- which bought PGP in 1997
    -- Zimmermann said he left the company so he could devote his time to
    making the open standard called OpenPGP more accepted in the industry.

    "For the past decade PGP has been the gold standard for e-mail
    encryption but we've always had trouble expanding beyond the power
    users because of ease-of-use problems," Zimmermann said in a statement
    on Monday. "The OpenPGP standard will be well served by Hush's fresh
    approach to ease of use and its roaming capability."

    Hush Communications, based in Dublin, Ireland, is a venture-capital
    funded company best known for its free, encrypted Hushmail and
    HushPOP services.

    Zimmermann's departure from Network Associates caps a turbulent decade
    marked by the release of his first version of "Pretty Good Privacy" in
    1991, his instant fame as a hero of the online privacy movement, a
    tussle with patent-holder RSA Data Security, and an agonizingly
    extended criminal investigation by the federal government for alleged
    violations of U.S. export laws governing cryptographic products.

    When the antiwar-activist-turned-programmer sold his company, PGP
    Inc., to Network Associates and became a senior fellow, he began to
    have clashes with executives over the direction of PGP. Network
    Associates repeatedly flirted with the concept of key recovery --
    endorsed by the Clinton administration but anathema to privacy
    advocates -- and has refused to publish the source code to the latest
    versions of PGP so outside experts can verify that no backdoors are
    present.

    Network Associates' departure from the aggressive kind of full
    disclosure favored by security analysts has fueled a move in the
    open-source community toward GNU Privacy Guard, a free replacement for
    PGP that does not rely on the patented IDEA algorithm. But its
    graphical interface, GNU Privacy Assistant, still is being developed
    and is not a finished product.

    [...] 




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