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title: Phil Zimmerman, Creator of PGP, Quote on Government & Crypto from 1996
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Today I finished reading [The Code Book][singh] by Simon Singh. It details the
history of cryptography from millenniums ago until the recent advances with
quantum cryptography.

In it there is a chapter dedicated to [Pretty Good Privacy][pgp] or more
commonly known as PGP. PGP was created by [Phil Zimmerman][zimm] in 1991 and turned
strong cryptographic practices into something everyone could use.

In the book it has a quotation from Zimmerman from an interview with a radio
show, [High Tech Today][radio], recorded in February 1996, over 17 years ago:

> Today we live in the information age. Everyone has computers. All the
> trappings of the information age are part of our lives. Paper mail is being
> replaced by electronic mail. Digital communications is taking over. We need
> encryption. The common person needs encryption to function effectively in the
> information age. So it's time for cryptography to step out of the shadows of
> spies and military stuff, and step out into the sunshine and be embraced by
> the rest of us.
>
> If our government ever goes bad, as sometimes happens in a democracy...
> Sometimes in a democracy bad people can be elected, and if democracy is
> allowed to function normally, these people can be taken out of power by the
> next election. But if a future government inherits a technology infrastructure
> that's optimized for surveillance, where they can watch the movements of their
> political opposition, they can see every bit of travel they could do, every
> financial transaction, every communication, every bit of email, every phone
> call, everything could be filtered and scanned and automatically recognized by
> voice recognition technology and transcribed.

[singh]: http://amzn.com/0385495323
[pgp]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
[zimm]: http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/background/index.html
[radio]: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/hightech/hightech.htm

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