Philip Zimmermann: The king of encryption reveals his fears of privacy
Phil Zimmermann at the V&A Museum in London. Photo: Frantzesco Kangaris for the Guardian
(Republished with translation from: The Guardian, "Philip Zimmermann: King of Encryption reveals his fears for privacy"By Juliette Garside @JulietteGarside, Monday 25 May 2015 17.02 BST)
The creator of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) has moved the mobile encryption company, Silent Circle, in Switzerland to be free from mass surveillance in the US. This article explains why.
When the Philip Zimmermann conducted a campaign for nuclear disarmament in the 1980 decade, holding a draft of his escape from his pocket. The inventor of the world's most widely used encryption system for e-mail, Pretty Good Privacy (better known as PGP) was ready to take his family from Colorado to New Zealand in a very short space of time.
It did not take time to do so and the Zimmermanns never moved. Until this year. In 61, the one selected in Internet Hall of Fame and founder of the three-year Silent Circle mobile encryption startup company, has just left the US for Switzerland. Ultimately, it was not the nuclear threat that persuaded him to leave his homeland, but the track of monitoring equipment.
"Every dystopian society has been over-monitored, but now we are seeing even Western democracies, such as the US and England, operating in this way"Warns us. "We have to reverse that. People who are not suspected of committing crimes should not have their information collected and stored in a database. We do not want to be like North Korea".
Zimmermann stopped in London for a reception at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where his cryptographic device, the Blackphone, along with the remnants of a laptop computer that was destroyed by government orders by the Guardian editors, because it contained a multitude of secret documents leaked from him Edward Snowden.
Philip Zimmermann interviews the Guardian
YouTube video, duration 00:02:27
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQu7LWO4SCA
Philip Zimmermann and Snowden have 30 years of age difference, but their actions have shaped the privacy debate. Philip Zimmermann changed his focus from his nuclear weapons campaign in his struggle to resist 1991 State Watch when PGP was released for free and freely on the internet as an act of civil disobedience. This protest helped prevent law enforcement, which would force software companies to enter "backpacks" into their products, allowing the government to read when encrypted communications messages (eg, Clipper chip).
The PGP User Manual, written by Philip Zimmermann, 1991 and updated seven years later, is an impressive preview of the mass surveillance methods finally adopted by the NSA after 9 / 11. There he warns us:
"Today, emails can be scanned regularly and automatically for interesting keywords, on a large scale, without this being perceived. This is like fishing with drifting nets".
They will still need 20 years before Snowden's revelations reveal these concerns to the attention of the general public. But when the former employee of an NSA contractor came in contact with journalists to help him become an informant, he did it using PGP.
They have not yet released numbers with their customers, but in the conversation among well-informed venture capitalists you say that Silent Circle expands quickly earlier this year has raised 50 million dollars in a second round of external finance search. Among its supporters include Ross Perot Jr., son of the US presidential candidate 1992.
Protesters support Edward Snowden, the NSA informant, outside the US consulate in Hong Kong. Photograph: Bobby Yip / Reuters
The second generation of Blackphone 2, costs about $ 700 and is about to come out on the market in the year, and probably will follow a first attempt with a tablet PC (a "Blacktablet" maybe). Philip Zimmermann launched the company along with former US Marine Sniper Mike Janke and both of them have been successful in selling their technology to special forces forces in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. Applications Silent Phone and Silent Text, which allow safe calls voice and text messaging with Android and Apple devices, are even more popular, especially among journalists who work in dangerous positions and in businesses where they handle sensitive information.
Despite the Silent Circle pin on his jacket lapel, Philip Zimmermann is less interested in us talking about his products, instead wanting us to discuss the need to reverse what he calls, “golden age of monitoring"Enjoyed by Western governments.
The relocation of Silent Circle to Switzerland had begun since its era Lavabit case. Lavabit was a company that provided an encrypted e-mail service for 410.000 people, including Edward Snowden. In the summer of 2013, to its founder, Ladar Levison, a court order was served requiring the installation monitoring equipment in his company. Despite protests, he himself he eventually decided to shut down his service and his company.
At Silent Circle they were afraid. They also offered these along with voice and text communications, and email. The content was encrypted, but who, where and when the messages (sender and recipient, and all metadata) were there for anyone who wanted to violate them and to see them either "illegally" or legally with a court order. So the email tool was closed and their database was completely erased. The next step was the relocation to Geneva. "We are less likely to face legal pressure there than if we stayed in the US," says Philip Zimmermann.
Στον μέσο όρο των νομοταγών πολιτών, οι ακτιβιστές όπως ο Zimmermann μπορεί να φαίνονται λίγο ως παρανοϊκοί. Η δημόσια support για τον Snowden στο Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο ήταν χλιαρή σε σύγκριση με αυτήν στη Γερμανία, όπου οι πραγματικότητες της ζωής κάτω από ένα αστυνομικό κράτος δεν απαιτούν και πολύ φαντασία.
The British Society "accepts too much tracking"Believes Philip Zimmermann. "Here people have a comfortable relationship with their own government and maybe that's why they don't object to it. Future governments that come to power may not be so nice, and if they inherit a surveillance infrastructure they could then use it to create a regime that cannot be changed". (note: as many features are made in the movie script "V for Vendetta")
It alerts us to point-and-click persecution, innocent traffic control cameras, and face recognition technology that can detect journalists who eat with whistleblowers or whistleblowers, political meetings with their mistresses or even individuals who lead after too many beers.
Of course, the commercial interests of Silent Circle are clearly served by the discussion of the threats that our private life is going through. Other internet pioneers have become billionaires and Philip Zimmermann is looking for his own share in the digital "Goldrush". "If I made some money from all this, it would not be such a terrible thing"He admits. "I get older and that's why I have to think about these things".
PGP-encrypted emails to prevent third-party tracking. Photo by Pawel Kopczynski / Reuters / Corbis
The secret life of PGP
The very life of Philip Zimmermann is a lesson on what can happen to those who question the US's ability to gather information.
Born in New Jersey and raised in Florida, his father was a cement truck driver. There was no expectation that she would be able to go to university. But the boy wanted to become an astronomer. "My family was poor, sometimes we did not even have a house to stay, so I went to many schools, and then when I went to college my life stabilized".
Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton did not have a computer mainframe. Its terminals, some with punchcards instead of screens, were connected via telephone lines to Miami. Zimmermann wrote his first program, taught the computer to learn his name. "There was something very cool in the ghost inside the engine. The computer was a machine that could respond to a person".
From 1980 he was transferred to Boulder, Colorado, and worked as an IT consultant, but he spent 40 hours a week as a peace activist. 1984 met the famous astronomer Carl Sagan, actor Martin Seen and the complainant on Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg - in a police station detention center. They were arrested after invading a nuclear test site in Nevada.
In April of 1991, the codewriting community was alerted to a clause in the Senate's 266 post-war (Gulf War) anti-terror bill (S.266 - Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act of 1991), which allowed the government to acquire "plain text content"Voice, data, and other communications,"after appropriate judicial authorization".
Zimmermann had previously designed PGP in his spare time and released his source code in June of that year. He hoped that if enough Americans began to protect their emails, just as the mail was protected by letters from the files, the relevant "intervention" law would have made no sense.
PGP works by assigning each user a key pair - one public and one private. The user shares their public key with the recipients of their messages - but messages sent to those who use it can only be decrypted with their private key. There is no central database with private keys to facilitate eavesdropping.
An engineer called Kelly Goen started distributing copies of PGP to file hosting computers. Fearing a government intervention (persecution and / or arrest), he took all appropriate preventive measures. Instead of working from his home, he drove the car around the San Francisco Bay Area with a laptop, an audio coupler and a cell phone. He stopped in a telephone booth, loaded copies for a few minutes, and then disconnected and went to another telephone booth.
Goen's upsets were banned on US sites, but PGP was finally released elsewhere. This clause was removed from the 266 bill, but in February 1993 visited Zimmermann two agents. The government, apparently, was trying to prosecute him for illegally exporting "ammunition" (Export of cryptography from United States). Strong encryption was considered, as a rule, as a weapon and Zimmermann was the subject of criminal investigation for three whole years before deducting all charges against them.
Today, its biggest concern is not the backdoors in the software, but the petabytes (1 petabyte = 1 million gigabytes) of information that buys companies such as Google and Facebook. "If you have collected all this data, they become an attractive source. It's that kind that a siren shouts calling someone to come and try to get them. Governments say that since private companies are ok, why can not their secret services have it?"
At the end of the interview, Philip Zimmermann answers a question with a short video. "Για να κάνει την δουλειά της η αστυνομία χρειάζεται λίγη μυστικότητα. Αν όμως παρά γίνει μυστική, μπορεί εύκολα να εξελιχθεί σε ένα αστυνομικό κράτος. Νομίζω ότι πρέπει να κοπεί ένα μικρό κομeye από αυτήν την μυστικότητα".
Prior to the video recording of the message, he removed the corporate brooch from his lapel. Zimmermann hopes to make some money, but for the father of encrypting e-mail, politics is still above trade.
