[1925] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
A Pretty Good Story, from The Netly News
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Declan McCullagh)
Mon Dec 8 16:27:37 1997
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 12:03:11 -0500
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
*********
http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1617,00.html
The Netly News Network (http://netlynews.com/)
December 8, 1997
A Pretty Good Story
by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)
Phil Zimmermann had it easy fighting the U.S. government: At
least everyone else was on his side. Today the legendary cryptographer
and founder of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is finding that his latest
adversaries are just as determined but much more diverse.
Earlier this fall PGP drew fire for releasing PGP 5.5 with a
so-called "message recovery" feature that a corporation could require
users to turn on to let the boss read their e-mail. Then, when McAfee
Associates announced last week it would buy PGP, formerly supportive
privacy advocates screamed that the company's new owners were part of
the "Key Recovery Alliance," a group of firms devoted to producing
data-scrambling software easily snoopable by the government.
Now the complaining may stop, at least for a while. The
McAfee-PGP combo, called Network Associates, has dropped out of the
alliance. "I never would have allowed my own company to join the Key
Recovery Alliance," Zimmermann told me yesterday. "As soon as I found
out about McAfee being a member, I tried to do something about it."
[...]
