FC: Phil Zimmermann leaves NSI, says PGP source should be published

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,41896,00.html

   PGP Creator Bolts to Hush
   by Declan McCullagh (declan () wired com)
   8:25 a.m. Feb. 20, 2001 PST

   Phil Zimmermann, the legendary creator of e-mail and file-encryption
   program PGP, will become the chief cryptographer for Web-based e-mail
   company Hush Communications.

   Citing differences with Network Associates -- which bought PGP in 1997
   -- Zimmermann said he left the company so he could devote his time to
   making the open standard called OpenPGP more accepted in the industry.

   "For the past decade PGP has been the gold standard for e-mail
   encryption but we've always had trouble expanding beyond the power
   users because of ease-of-use problems," Zimmermann said in a statement
   on Monday. "The OpenPGP standard will be well served by Hush's fresh
   approach to ease of use and its roaming capability."

   Hush Communications, based in Dublin, Ireland, is a venture-capital
   funded company best known for its free, encrypted Hushmail and
   HushPOP services.

   Zimmermann's departure from Network Associates caps a turbulent decade
   marked by the release of his first version of "Pretty Good Privacy" in
   1991, his instant fame as a hero of the online privacy movement, a
   tussle with patent-holder RSA Data Security, and an agonizingly
   extended criminal investigation by the federal government for alleged
   violations of U.S. export laws governing cryptographic products.

   When the antiwar-activist-turned-programmer sold his company, PGP
   Inc., to Network Associates and became a senior fellow, he began to
   have clashes with executives over the direction of PGP. Network
   Associates repeatedly flirted with the concept of key recovery --
   endorsed by the Clinton administration but anathema to privacy
   advocates -- and has refused to publish the source code to the latest
   versions of PGP so outside experts can verify that no backdoors are
   present.

   Network Associates' departure from the aggressive kind of full
   disclosure favored by security analysts has fueled a move in the
   open-source community toward GNU Privacy Guard, a free replacement for
   PGP that does not rely on the patented IDEA algorithm. But its
   graphical interface, GNU Privacy Assistant, still is being developed
   and is not a finished product.

   [...] 




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