Why I Wrote PGP.
Philip Zimmermann.
Part of the Original 1991 PGP User's Guide (updated in 1999)
It's personal. It's private. And it's no one's business but yours. You
may be planning a political campaign, discussing your taxes, or having a
secret romance. Or you may be communicating with a political dissident
in a repressive country. Whatever it is, you don't want your private
electronic mail (email) or confidential documents read by anyone else.
There's nothing wrong with asserting your privacy. Privacy is as
apple-pie as the Constitution.
The right to privacy is spread implicitly throughout the Bill of Rights.
But when the United States Constitution was framed, the Founding Fathers
saw no need to explicitly spell out the right to a private conversation.
That would have been silly. Two hundred years ago, all conversations
were private. If someone else was within earshot, you could just go out
behind the barn and have your conversation there. No one could listen in
without your knowledge. The right to a private conversation was a
natural right, not just in a philosophical sense, but in a
law-of-physics sense, given the technology of the time.
But with the coming of the information age, starting with the invention
of the telephone, all that has changed. Now most of our conversations
are conducted electronically. This allows our most intimate
conversations to be exposed without our knowledge. Cellular phone calls
may be monitored by anyone with a radio. Electronic mail, sent across
the Internet, is no more secure than cellular phone calls. Email is
rapidly replacing postal mail, becoming the norm for everyone, not the
novelty it was in the past.
more...
http://wapurl.co.uk/?HS9UZC3
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