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Phil Zimmermann Talk Summary And Audio
Ames Cornish writes "Philip Zimmermann, the creator of PGP, spoke
on Security and Privacy to a standing-room-only crowd in San Francisco on July 31st. There is a short
summary and audio recording of the event on the
Software Development Forum site. Phil talked about
Dmitry Sklyarov, Nicodemo Scarfo,
Phil's own experience as the victim of US government persecution, and how automatic weapons were involved in the attempt to get export permission for PGP." The MP3 is at the bottom of the page.
(Grabbed before the inevitable Slashdot effect.)
At the inaugural Internet Security and Privacy event, Philip Zimmermann, the creator of the world's most popular email encryption software, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), spoke to a standing-room-only audience in San Francisco. A decade ago, the Federal government accused Phil of violating the Arms Export Control Act for munitions trafficking. The government claimed that U.S. national security was jeopardized when PGP was spread around the world as free encryption software. The investigation of Phil Zimmermann continued for three years. The feds eventually dropped their case.
Phil spoke about the current Dmitry Sklyarov case. Dmitry is a Russian programmer who was thrown in jail by the federal government at the behest of Adobe. Adobe claims that software Dmitry created for his employer in Russia violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After meetings with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Adobe had a change of heart and asked the feds to drop criminal charges against Dmitry. Phil characterized criminal law as a "blunt instrument" when used to enforce encryption software policies. Phil also related to the terror of having the federal government threaten you with incarceration for writing a piece of code.
Phil went on to discuss another current criminal case, that against Nicodemo S. Scarfo, in which the FBI used electronic eavesdropping to access data which Mr. Scarfo had reportedly encrypted with PGP. While the FBI had a search warrant, Phil believes law enforcement should be held to the higher wire-tap standards before permitting on-going electronic surveillance.
Phil also had a number of stories to tell about the development of PGP and his efforts to get permission to export that software. Only one episode involved the brandishing of automatic weapons in a bank building, however.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Yeah, but was it a pansy-ass MAC-11, or was it a true crew-served heavy automatic weapon like a M2 Browning or Mk19?
Big difference.
Which proves Netscape is the better browser.
There's an article (one of two) on the Linux Journal website about GNU Privacy Guard for PGP functionality for us *NIX folks.
-yb
Could you tell us where these stories which are not posted yet, are to be found?
Otherwise I would have a hard time believing your story...
Interesting to note that an .asp site is surviving this quite successfully. I never thought I'd see the day IIS held up to the /. effect, but there it is...
You all should stop downloading that mp3. Its making my download slow down.
thanks.
It's bad enough that people are talking about this bug. The last thing we need is for the editors to get wind of this and patch the hole.
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
In any case, let's be glad he doesn't sing on it, or else the RIAA would come after him, too.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
Also, some retarded distributors (like Redhat) set the Fixed-width font to Helvetica by default, which of course is not fixed-width at all.
Let's keep this hush-hush. For example, no more bug reports about it to sourceforge, OK?
I swear to you all that this is true. The following email was just submitted to the Portland Oregon Free Sklyarov email list:
The latest domain name extension has arrived .SEX!!! It's the fresh ,new,
exciting web address that is taking the world by storm.
Who wants to be .com when you can now be .SEX
Register your .SEX domain name today exclusively at: [pr0n link deleted]
With this addition I can see his cause getting MAJOR "exposure" now.
Not once. Ever.
And I'm straining the system at least somewhat -- six-port serial board (with all ports connected and receiving data simultanteously), Matlab and/or Mathematica, and various combinations of mp3 player, StarOffice, Gimp, and a web browser.
As for your comments regarding the robustness of ext2fs, the handful of times my machine has been forcibly turned off (power outages, guy in a backhoe cutting power cable, etc.), it has recovered automatically - without an ounce of intervention from me - every single time. Never lost so much as a bit. And the simple recover utility I got from Freshmeat has worked flawlessly on those occasions where I lost data due to my own stupidity.
And for all this, I never spent a cent on purchasing software. The largest download I ever did (full RH install from their FTP site) might have taken a few hours over a slow modem.
So I dunno, maybe you have lousy karma or something -- the observations you make bear no resemblance to reality in my experience.
Then again, maybe you're just a trolling idiot.
I sent a very nice, polite bug report saying that the URLs are broken in w3m, since for some stupid reason they left the 'http:' off the beginning of all the intra-site URLs, i.e. '//slashdot.org/users.pl' instead of 'http://slashdot.org/users.pl'. But instead of taking the 5 seconds it would take to fix this, they just say "Sorry, your browser's broken, we aren't going to fix it." I find it terribly ironic that they get all up-in-arms whenever a new version of Microsoft Whatever breaks compatibility with anything, but don't care the slightest bit when they do the exact same thing. Disgusting.
People who are concerned about the UN taking over their countries or usurping the authority of the country should also be pointing their concern towards the US's mega corporations. As free enterprise as I am, the bigger businesses seem to own major portions of some countries and specifically major portions of their governments.
Maybe it's time to start throttling campaign funding from corporations, as much as that's a 1st amendment issue as well.
There has to be a middle ground here.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
and what is the response?
"We know that they are guilty because they were convicted of the crime, and we have no interest in helping a guilty man go free"
I have seen this on the news several times over the past few months. You can see the logic of it all. It is blind and arbitrary conviction to "principles" unencumbered by the thought process.
Now we transfer this to other areas of Law enforcement, and we can see how the lack of education and sheer strupidity can lead to the legal situations we face in the technology arena.
Yes, some of these people are in fact stupid, and to fix the problem would take several years of experience and education that you happen to have, but they don't.
- - -
Radio Free Nation
is a news site based on Slash Code
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
- - -
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
OK, PGP is good software, it's a revolution, blah blah blah. All true. No questions.
It's also true that the US government investigated Phil Zimmerman quite extensively, and considered what to do about him. This went on several years.
However unless things have changed since I last got up to speed on things, Zimmerman was never prosecuted. No charges were laid, no time was served, no record was created. Phil is and always has been a free man without a criminal record (at least as a result of PGP). Is this wrong? Have things changed?
I'm not saying that he didn't go through a nasty few years, and that it was all stupid, but he shouldn't be treated like a saint. For that matter, neither should his side of the story be taken entirely at face value. Remember, there _is_ another side, even if the government won't/can't talk about it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Phil is a funny guy. Take for example the way he lists his phone number online.
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
My memory of the talk at SDForum...
The PGP guys were getting around export restrictions by printing the code on paper, which they distributed at a crypto group meeting, with the old nudge nudge wink wink type of intention (somebody sent it overseas? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you). So here they are, purposefully handing it out in this very public forum, as a CYOA move trying to legitimize the distribution. And later in the meeting, some guy pops up with a big duffel bag, and announces the gun SIG will be meeting next week for some shooting or something, and unzips the bag and pulls out some kind of automatic rifle, mortifying Phil and crew. Better yet, the meeting was being held on the 15th floor of a bank, so if the guy had been caught walking into the building, well, you do the math... Would've been wonderful to be a fly on the wall that day...
ehintz
I don't know my automatic weapons all that well, but I think it had been an AR-15. It was entertaining to watch the reactions in the room when [pseudonym-deleted] got it out.
There wasn't any nudge-nudge-wink-wink about the distribution - it was more of a "please take one if you've got some suitable overseas contacts to mail it to."
This is MOST informative.
Unfortunately this probably IS the reason why it is all messed up.
Law Enforcement without justice is arbitrary, and is a greased skid to dictatorship (pick you favorite)
It is a blind spot that is likely the achilles heal of our world. This is _exactly_ what is going on with the DCMA, the MPAA, the RIAA, etc.
Law Enforcement, not Justice.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Isn't hope a verb, genious?
Has a nice history of PGP.