Al Gore is only 630 votes away from winning the election
With 99.9 percent of the votes in Florida counted, Al Gore is only 630 votes away from winning the presidency. The Florida Department of State reports -- in numbers updated in the last five minutes -- that George W. Bush won 2,898,865 votes with Gore scoring 2,898,235. You can see the stats for yourself at: http://enight.dos.state.fl.us/SummaryRpt.asp?ElectionDate=11/7/00RACE=PRE If Bush does not win Florida he cannot win the presidency, based on the numbers calculated by CNN and the networks. Oregon and Wisconsin, the two states still labeled as tossups, have a combined total of 18 votes, not enough to propel Bush to the necessary 270 electoral votes without Florida. A win in Florida would guarantee Gore a victory. Third parties in Florida made a difference. Libertarian Harry Browne won 15,609 votes, and the Green Party's Ralph Nader received 94,201 votes in the state. Nader occasionally claims that he lures voters who would not otherwise go to the polls. But if even one percent of Nader's voters had turned to Gore -- a certainty -- the presidential election would have turned out differently. With only a 630 vote difference out of some 6 million votes cast in Florida, a recount could go a different way. As I write this, Gore has made a concession call to Bush, but I'd imagine the Dems would want a recount. That's what Gore's supporters are chanting in Tennessee, anyway. -Declan
Re: Al Gore is only 630 votes away from winning the election
Declan the Reporter wrote: #Al Gore is only 630 votes away from winning the election Now they'll have to wait until all the absentee ballots are counted. They had to be postedmarked by midnight. Approximately 10 days away. Surreal.
Well, that's over. Heads up, America!
OK you folks on the downwind side of the Atlantic, now your election is over (even if you won't know the result for 3 weeks yet), can you take your weather back? We've had a month of egregious rain and floods over here and I'm sure it has to be your fault somehow. 5 tornadoes in Sussex (my home county) one of them even killed people. These things just don't happen in England. It must be the Americans fault. Somehow. It wasn't like this in my day... What did happen to Jim Bell? Just a search or worse? You were all posting about it then got side-tracked into polling hours. Did he phone Declan? Ken Brown As a foreigner (from your USan POV) far be it from me to try to make any suggestions about your internal politics but I never was any good at temptation so... if the recount (surely there has to be one?) postal votes in Florida go Bush's way you may have removed the last obstacle to Hillary becoming president or VP next time round :-) You guys have political dynasties now. Like they do in India and places like that. (Was Gore Vidal named for Al's grandad?) Chelsea vs. Jeb junior in 2020? And why are both presidential candidates such bores? The received wisdom is that politics at that level is all about advertising, TV, good looks, soundbites and star quality. Doesn't this contest disprove that? Both main candidates look really, really boring on TV (though George W "Too many of our imports come from overseas" Bush sometimes says some amusingly stupid-sounding things. But then so did General Haig :-( Thinking over the men who you've had as president in my TV-watching-lifetime, only two (Kennedy Clinton) had anything approaching "star quality" on TV. Ford, the older Bush Carter came over as pretty normal (dull in one case, likeable in the others), Johnson sort of weird, and Nixon actually repulsive. Some Americans tell me that Reagan played well on TV but to us Europeans that just goes to show how strange Americans can be. Over here, he looked scary. Of course I've no idea what any of these people are like in real life - just how they seem through the media. Same goes with knobs on for our UK Prime Ministers. Only the present incumbent Harold Macmillan (who you guys will never have heard of) could have been called good-looking, MacMillan was past it by the time he got to be PM. Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Major - none of them were ever going to get to be a chat show host. Thatcher was ( is) almost universally hated, even by those who voted for her. Maybe that is why most of your states voted dam near 50-50 for each candidate. Same policies on most things that count, and where they differ nobody believes them anyway. (Is Bush really saying, as his Tory acolytes over here in Britain are, that you can cut taxes *and* increase pubic spending? Does anyone take that seriously enough to factor it in to their voting behaviour?). And neither of them comes over as more than a worthy 3rd-generation public servant. (What we call "the Great and the Good" - the sort of people that get appointed onto commissions and boards and inquiries) With nothing to choose between them, votes just came out at random. Certainly that is how Labour got in in UK. Everyone hated the Tories. Labour promised - in writing - to carry on Tory policies on most things (they even adopted the Tory budget for 2 years). So the only issue was that Labour looked like the nice guys. Landslide.
Weather [was: RE: Well, that's over. Heads up, America!]
Ken Brown[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: OK you folks on the downwind side of the Atlantic, now your election is over (even if you won't know the result for 3 weeks yet), can you take your weather back? We've had a month of egregious rain and floods over here and I'm sure it has to be your fault somehow. 5 tornadoes in Sussex (my home county) one of them even killed people. These things just don't happen in England. It must be the Americans fault. Somehow. It wasn't like this in my day... [...] Ken Brown [...] I once heard a European pundit observe that Americans seem normal most of the time, but every now and then something surfaces to make it clear just how alien they actually are. The example he gave was the American obsession with weather. In Europe, talk about the weather is just conversational padding; noise of no serious consequence to fill an otherwise awkward silences. Americans, on the other hand, MEAN IT when they talk about the weather. They sit up and pay attention when forecasts appear. All US cable systems carry a channel which broadcasts nothing except weather reports, 24x7 - a notion which seems as bizarre to Europeans as would a channel for watching the grass grow. He surmised that this is due to the fact that in the US, unlike Europe, bad weather can kill you. [And even if it doesn't kill you, it can sure as hell play havoc with your day. I've had over 2 feet of snow overnight at my house, while 10 miles away there was just rain. Mark Twain once gave a speech about the New England weather: http://marktwain.about.com/arts/marktwain/library/speeches/bl_weather.htm It's worth a look. ] Peter Trei
Re: Al Gore is only 630 votes away from winning the election
At 3:49 AM -0500 11/8/00, Declan McCullagh wrote: With 99.9 percent of the votes in Florida counted, Al Gore is only 630 votes away from winning the presidency. The Florida Department of State reports -- in numbers updated in the last five minutes -- that George W. Bush won 2,898,865 votes with Gore scoring 2,898,235. I'm watching Jesse Jackson on CNN, saying he and others (Al Sharpton, etc.) will be rallying to investigate "irregularities" in Florida. They plan marches. Both sides are now scrambling to find the extra votes they need. I wouldn't be at all surprised if both sides don't turn up "undiscovered" votes. Or if both sides don't sue to invalidate entire blocs of votes (from certain precincts). The longer the recount goes on, the more suspect the final tally, ironically enough. The one good thing out of this circus is that neither party will have the "mandate" to push for lots of new laws. --Tim May -- -:-:-:-:-:-:-: Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
Re: More blather from the DEMS on FL
- Original Message - From: "William H. Geiger III" [EMAIL PROTECTED] While the recount of the FL ballots is going on the Democrats are now complaining about the format of the ballot and threating legal action. It seems that the ballot is "confusing". The complaint is that the double sided ballot contained 2 columns on each side rather than one. Even better tactic: CNN just reported that the Little House in the Ghetto nursery school found an abandoned voting-box full of Al Gore ballots... er, some election worker must have forgot them there last night. Better get them into the count.
RE: Weather [was: RE: Well, that's over. Heads up, America!]
i think the weather thing has more to do with the agricultural background of the country, and how this influenced the development of American Society at an early stage. Most Americans i've spoken with don't actually "MEAN IT"... perhaps there's some selfish concern about being comfortable in the weather at hand while doing some inane activity. Tennis (or whatever) in the snow? does this really seem so bizarre? -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Trei, Peter Sent: Wednesday, November 08, 2000 10:29 AM To: cypherpunks Mailing List; 'Ken Brown' Subject: Weather [was: RE: Well, that's over. Heads up, America!] Ken Brown[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: OK you folks on the downwind side of the Atlantic, now your election is over (even if you won't know the result for 3 weeks yet), can you take your weather back? We've had a month of egregious rain and floods over here and I'm sure it has to be your fault somehow. 5 tornadoes in Sussex (my home county) one of them even killed people. These things just don't happen in England. It must be the Americans fault. Somehow. It wasn't like this in my day... [...] Ken Brown [...] I once heard a European pundit observe that Americans seem normal most of the time, but every now and then something surfaces to make it clear just how alien they actually are. The example he gave was the American obsession with weather. In Europe, talk about the weather is just conversational padding; noise of no serious consequence to fill an otherwise awkward silences. Americans, on the other hand, MEAN IT when they talk about the weather. They sit up and pay attention when forecasts appear. All US cable systems carry a channel which broadcasts nothing except weather reports, 24x7 - a notion which seems as bizarre to Europeans as would a channel for watching the grass grow. He surmised that this is due to the fact that in the US, unlike Europe, bad weather can kill you. [And even if it doesn't kill you, it can sure as hell play havoc with your day. I've had over 2 feet of snow overnight at my house, while 10 miles away there was just rain. Mark Twain once gave a speech about the New England weather: http://marktwain.about.com/arts/marktwain/library/speeches/bl_weather.htm It's worth a look. ] Peter Trei
How the Net gave the right Florida count
My article you received late last night: "Al Gore is only 630 votes away from winning the election" http://www.politechbot.com/p-01481.html Seems to have been the first article anywhere (3:35 am) to report that Bush's lead in Florida had dwindled to the hundreds, although CBS at approximately the same time had mentioned those numbers on the air. The politech article also appears to be the first to predict a recount. According to a wire service search, Dow Jones Newswire moved a similar article three minutes after the politech message (3:38 am), though it did not mention a recount: "WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--Vice President Al Gore now trails Texas Governor George W. Bush by only 629 votes in Florida, throwing the U.S. election results into question, CBS News reported early Wednesday." AP had moved an advisory about 20 minutes before (3:11 am) saying that Bush's lead was in the thousands: "The lead in Florida for George W. Bush has dwindled to about 6,000 in the vote count." Dow Jones, in an article distributed at the same time (3:08 am), called the election even with those thousands of votes outstanding: "In an election that ultimately came down to a few thousand votes in Florida, Texas Governor George W. Bush has won the race for the presidency holding off a strong challenge from Vice President Al Gore." The networks, of course, had called the election for Bush at 2:17 am, after incorrectly saying earlier in the evening that Florida would go to Gore. Part of this mess comes from how mainstream media sources relied on Voter News Service for their results. For instance, CNN reported at 3:45 am that the Florida results were 2,890,321 (Bush) and 2,884,261 (Gore). That spread was still about 6,000 votes. For my politech article, I used the Net to go directly to the Florida secretary of state's website. The numbers there were about 20 minutes newer than CNN had at the same time. To their credit, CBS News apparently switched to those same numbers, although their hasty calculation of a 629 vote difference was incorrect. -Declan
[RRE]Florida recount
--- begin forwarded text Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 11:21:33 -0800 From: Phil Agre [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Red Rock Eater News Service" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [RRE]Florida recount Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [Peter Orvetti http://www.orvetti.com/, whose site was easily the fastest and most reliable last night, says that a locked ballot box was found in a Democratic region of Florida. Missing ballot boxes are a Florida tradition, and I enclose a piece on the 1988 Senate election that Peter Neumann wrote for SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes. Reformatted to 70 columns.] =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" option. For information about RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 10:20:27 PST From: "Peter G. Neumann" [EMAIL PROTECTED] [...] FROM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, January 1989, Peter G. Neumann: The latest item on the integrity of computers in elections relates to the November 1988 Senate race in Florida. *The New York Times* (Saturday, 12 Nov 88, page 9) had an article by Andrew Rosenthal on suspicions of fraud arising from the results. At the end of the Election Day ballot counting, the Democrat Buddy Mackay was ahead. After the absentee ballots were counted, the Republican Connie Mack was declared the winner by 30,000 votes out of 4 million. However, in four counties (for which B.R.C. provided the computing services), the number of votes counted for Senator was 200,000 votes less than the votes for President while in other counties and in previous elections the two vote totals have generally been close to each other. Remembering that punched card are intrinsically a flaky medium and easy to alter surreptitiously, and that the computer systems in question reportedly permit their operators to turn off the audit trails and to change arbitrary memory locations on the fly, it seems natural to wonder whether anything strange went on. Subsequent to the Times article, a recount was requested, but a selective recount of a few precincts apparently turned up nothing unusual. However, doubts linger about the essential subvertibility of the process -- particularly in the case of punched cards. In Texas, a law suit has been filed on behalf of the voters of the state challenging the entire election and requesting not a recount but an entirely new election. The grounds are that the State did not follow its own procedures for certifying the election equipment. --- end forwarded text -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: Courts interfering with election
At 07:46 PM 11/7/00 -0800, Tim May wrote: Late news: Just saw Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri calling for an investigation into "criminal voting fraud" by the Democrat political machine in St. Louis and the lower court judge (if he was appointed by Democrats, the jig's up). Ashcroft faces a very, very, very close election, and that extra blast of welfare roll voters may have been enough to defeat him. Mighty niggardly of the Democrats, I'd say. Spooky, in fact. On the other hand, doing a baitswitch on closing times is also going to affect the voting response, especially for people who work late or weird shifts and were planning to vote at 9pm. Also, maybe Tim hasn't voted somewhere new in a while, but this is a polling system run by government bureaucrats, who have a level of enthusiasm and competence for providing high-quality service for inner-city residents that's _much_ different from the quality of service that they provide for rich folks. Sometimes the poll-workers can read and write, and sometimes there are enough poll-workers, and if there's a political machine around, they also know how to count, and what they're counting, and for whom, and what things are important to count accurately, like money, and what things are not important to count accurately, like poor people's votes. When things screw up in an overworked clerical environment, they screw up badly. Somebody I was talking to last night was at the polling place, and the guy in front of her was trying to straighten out the two registrations from the same address, one for John Doe, Democrat, and one for John J. Doe, Republican (no, they weren't father and son, they were the same guy) That's an easier case for him, at least if he only wants to vote once (:-). And it's much messier when the people are tenants who move a lot. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
FL ballot box missing/found
--- begin forwarded text Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 15:25:25 -0500 (EST) From: Somebody Subject: FL ballot box missing/found To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dear Sir: FL polling stations -- at least in my county -- have two boxes with locks. When voting is over, up to a dozen voluntary poll workers lock the used and unused ballots in a small box. They lock it up and two of them must drive the box to a central collection office. Other polling station equipment is left at the polling site -- the vote machines, office supplies, and such are left in the polling place -- be it a school room, the American Legion Hall, or a church site. The office supplies are to be put in a large locked box -- left at the polling place for subsequent pickup by reps of the County Supervisor of Elections. Finding a large, locked box in the polling place is quite natural. It contains no ballots -- only pens, staple machines, posters and such. Somebody's .sig --- end forwarded text -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: CDR: Re: More blather from the DEMS on FL
- Original Message - From: "Evan" [EMAIL PROTECTED] what the hell is the electoral college still doing in existance? it should have gone out w/ unlimited presidential terms voting with their conscience my ass voting in a partisan fashion is more like it Why bother; amending the constitution is a thing of the past, interpreting it is in style. When CNN finds that the recount isn't getting ratings, they will simply start reporting, based on a legal correspondent Gretta van Sustren's constitutional reading, that Al Gore is the President. Within a week everyone will accept it and move on.
RE: A successful lawsuit means Gore wins!
Title: RE: A successful lawsuit means Gore wins! There cannot be a re-vote of the County, or even of the entire State, as this would distort the forces acting on the electorate in a way never seen before. The Palm County voters would know _they_ would be electing the next president. Billions of dollars would be spent trying to buy each and every voter. distort the forces ... Lord! No! Don't let them do that! Geez, Tim. What happened to personal responsibility? Who gives two bits what forces will be upon them. They will ultimately still have to cast a vote which they were casting just days earlier. Who cares if idiots spend billions to sway a few thousand votes. That's THEIR problem. It's free speech, as you have claimed in the past. I still don't get this uproar over re-doing something that was fishy. Who's rights are being trampled upon by this? Ern
Re: A successful lawsuit means Gore wins!
- Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The ballot layout was illegal and resulted in a statistically verifiable set of erroneous votes for Bucanun. This is particularly galling to the voting victims, since many are Jewish. What? No slight against the Amiga?
Phil Zimmerman Profiled
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Watch the word wrap: http://developer.earthweb.com/earthweb/cda/dlink.resource-jhtml.72.1081. |repository||softwaredev|content|article|2000|10|03|SDLairdZim|SDLairdZ im~xml.0.jhtml?cda=true (PGP Signature applied with appreciation to PRZ) Meet Phil Zimmermann, creator of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption suite and one of the world's best-known cryptographers. Published October 04, 2000 By Cameron Laird Page 1 of 2 1 2 Programmers can be celebrities too. Just ask Philip (Phil) Zimmermann. He's spent most of the last decade as a folk hero, and admits to having enjoyed that status. Just this summer, he suffered the flip side of fame as wildly inflated rumors circulated about his role in compromising the security of the PGP encryption suite, and he watched his e-mail inbox fill with venom. A Human Rights Project He recognizes it comes with the territory. Zimmermann is probably the world's best-known cryptographer. He created the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption suite in 1991. Since then, it has come to dominate the market for programming protection of online confidentiality. PGP has been heralded for its role in protecting numerous political dissidents around the world, and earned Zimmermann the prestigious Norbert Wiener Award for responsible use of technology in 1996, as well as the 1995 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and a 1998 Lifetime Achievement Award from Secure Computing Magazine, along with at least a dozen other distinctions. It also brought him into highly public patent disputes with RSA Data Security Inc., and a nightmarish multi-year criminal investigation by the United States government. It began as a human rights campaign. As the '90s opened, Zimmermann was an experienced programmer -- and a pretty good one by all accounts, including his own -- specializing in data security and communications and real-time embedded systems. Electronic communications technologies were becoming widely available, and politically significant: combinations of underground radio, video tapes, satellite news updates, and e-mail are generally acknowledged to have been indispensable in the popular overthrow of Iran's Shah, Eastern Europe's Bolsheviks, and several dictatorships throughout the third world. Technical challenges remained. How, for example, could human rights monitors communicate their on-site findings without risking recrimination or distortion? How might any citizen communicate freely and fearlessly over channels subject to tapping? One technical solution was encryption: "scrambling" a message so it was unreadable except to the sender and intended receiver. Zimmermann had worked on commercial encryption systems during the '80s, and he envisioned that it could be applied more widely. He developed PGP as an "add-on" that any e-mail user could install to ensure confidentiality. A Response to Legislation And it worked. It also became controversial, which brought more attention, and encouraged even more users to experiment with it. Nowadays it's become part of the popular culture of computing. It has been so widely disseminated that even many industry participants who rely on it know nothing about Zimmermann, and assume it was first created for the commercial applications -- retail sales, banking, and so on-in which it is used today. Zimmermann, however, emphasizes that for him it remains a human-rights project. PGP was born in controversy. Zimmermann wrote version 1.0 as a response to United States Senate Bill 266. If it had been passed, this legislation would have required all communications vendors to embed "back doors" to permit government agencies to tap their products. He rushed a release of 1.0 into the hands of his computing friends, at least one of whom began to distribute it on bulletin boards throughout North America. Its circulation meant that any criminality resulting from passage of the bill would have been difficult to enforce. Code-sharing didn't stop at national borders, though, and there was nothing hypothetical about it: export of PGP outside the U.S. (with possible exceptions involving Canada) was definitely illegal. Everyone involved agreed that the Office of Defense Trade Control's enforcement of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) extended to cryptographic software. Whom to Prosecute? Whom could the US Department of Justice indict, though? Zimmermann just programmed and talked; he was careful not to engage in any "munitions exports" himself. Despite these precautions, criminal charges were brought against him. The programming and civil rights communities joined to create a legal defense fund. After three years of what Zimmermann calmly categorizes as "persecution," prosecutors dropped the case in early 1996 with as little comment as they had earlier justified it. Controversy didn't end there. Even before the criminal indictment, RSA notified Zimmermann that
Phil Zimmerman Profiled
Watch the word wrap: http://developer.earthweb.com/earthweb/cda/dlink.resource-jhtml.72.1081.|rep ository||softwaredev|content|article|2000|10|03|SDLairdZim|SDLairdZim~xml.0. jhtml?cda=true (PGP Signature applied with appreciation to PRZ) Meet Phil Zimmermann, creator of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption suite and one of the world's best-known cryptographers. Published October 04, 2000 By Cameron Laird Page 1 of 2 1 2 Programmers can be celebrities too. Just ask Philip (Phil) Zimmermann. He's spent most of the last decade as a folk hero, and admits to having enjoyed that status. Just this summer, he suffered the flip side of fame as wildly inflated rumors circulated about his role in compromising the security of the PGP encryption suite, and he watched his e-mail inbox fill with venom. A Human Rights Project He recognizes it comes with the territory. Zimmermann is probably the world's best-known cryptographer. He created the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption suite in 1991. Since then, it has come to dominate the market for programming protection of online confidentiality. PGP has been heralded for its role in protecting numerous political dissidents around the world, and earned Zimmermann the prestigious Norbert Wiener Award for responsible use of technology in 1996, as well as the 1995 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and a 1998 Lifetime Achievement Award from Secure Computing Magazine, along with at least a dozen other distinctions. It also brought him into highly public patent disputes with RSA Data Security Inc., and a nightmarish multi-year criminal investigation by the United States government. It began as a human rights campaign. As the '90s opened, Zimmermann was an experienced programmer -- and a pretty good one by all accounts, including his own -- specializing in data security and communications and real-time embedded systems. Electronic communications technologies were becoming widely available, and politically significant: combinations of underground radio, video tapes, satellite news updates, and e-mail are generally acknowledged to have been indispensable in the popular overthrow of Iran's Shah, Eastern Europe's Bolsheviks, and several dictatorships throughout the third world. Technical challenges remained. How, for example, could human rights monitors communicate their on-site findings without risking recrimination or distortion? How might any citizen communicate freely and fearlessly over channels subject to tapping? One technical solution was encryption: "scrambling" a message so it was unreadable except to the sender and intended receiver. Zimmermann had worked on commercial encryption systems during the '80s, and he envisioned that it could be applied more widely. He developed PGP as an "add-on" that any e-mail user could install to ensure confidentiality. A Response to Legislation And it worked. It also became controversial, which brought more attention, and encouraged even more users to experiment with it. Nowadays it's become part of the popular culture of computing. It has been so widely disseminated that even many industry participants who rely on it know nothing about Zimmermann, and assume it was first created for the commercial applications -- retail sales, banking, and so on-in which it is used today. Zimmermann, however, emphasizes that for him it remains a human-rights project. PGP was born in controversy. Zimmermann wrote version 1.0 as a response to United States Senate Bill 266. If it had been passed, this legislation would have required all communications vendors to embed "back doors" to permit government agencies to tap their products. He rushed a release of 1.0 into the hands of his computing friends, at least one of whom began to distribute it on bulletin boards throughout North America. Its circulation meant that any criminality resulting from passage of the bill would have been difficult to enforce. Code-sharing didn't stop at national borders, though, and there was nothing hypothetical about it: export of PGP outside the U.S. (with possible exceptions involving Canada) was definitely illegal. Everyone involved agreed that the Office of Defense Trade Control's enforcement of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) extended to cryptographic software. Whom to Prosecute? Whom could the US Department of Justice indict, though? Zimmermann just programmed and talked; he was careful not to engage in any "munitions exports" himself. Despite these precautions, criminal charges were brought against him. The programming and civil rights communities joined to create a legal defense fund. After three years of what Zimmermann calmly categorizes as "persecution," prosecutors dropped the case in early 1996 with as little comment as they had earlier justified it. Controversy didn't end there. Even before the criminal indictment, RSA notified Zimmermann that it considered PGP an infringement of its patents. Zimmermann
