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Greplaw Interviews Phil Zimmermann
LawGeek writes "The venerable GrepLaw crew has struck again, this time with Editor Mikael Pawlo interviewing PGP author and all-around encryption expert Phil Zimmermann. Pawlo discussed a number of topics with Zimmerman, including the current state of encryption export laws, DRM, and activism against erosion of privacy both in the U.S. and internationally. The interview is here."
And I don't have the key! This will take decades to crack. Stupid PGP.
Whats wrong with that? It might have prevented the dispute in court over driver's license photos and muslim women wearing veils...with a fingerprint, you dont need picture ID, and its more reliable.
Sig- http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?ayefly
# But you donâ(TM)t code any more?
I havenâ(TM)t written code in many years. I am active in policy space rather writing code, doing a lot of public speaking. There is a lot of need for activism now in the shadow of the Patriot Act.
Interesting. I would have thought that hammering out the bugs in the law would have been the oldest form of coding.
___________________________________
The Spiders are coming.
You might want some pretty good privacy for that insertion!
So Phil, what is your position on the question of balancing national security concerns against the civil rights of said nation's citizens, in the context of allowing citizens to use uncrackable encryption ?
OMG! That is like the COOLEST QUESTION ! Wow, I'm like totally into law and stuff, and like did you look at my boobies? No, they're not real! OMG, as if!
Glove sales are up... and public restrooms are wondering why there are footprints on the flush control.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
When asked about encryption technology, he thought it was great that a person could control who read his data. When asked about DRM, he said it was bad that a person could restrict who reads his data. Or does Zimmerman have a bias against companies? A person should be free to encrypt data, but not a company? Or is is, you should be able to encrypt data unless you're selling it? DRM is encryption. I don't see why this guy thinks some people have the right to use it while others don't, just because he thinks it's bad for society somehow when some people use it. He didn't care that terrorists were using PGP, but was concerned about the music industry using DRM. That I find disturbing.
Vote for Pedro
Here are links to more Greplaw interviews that you may find interesting:
Patrik Faltstrom on IESG, IETF etc.
Don Marti on free software, patents and the Internet.
Cyberlaw profiles: Jennifer Granick.
We try to interview interesting people who one way or another affect and form Internet law and policy. Feel free to suggest people we should interview.
Regards,
Mikael
Pawlo.com
Is that the line between law enforcement officers as peace officers and law enforcement officers as oppressors is very thin in most situations. The federal law enforcement apparatus is slowly beginning to aspire to KGB-level power over the population.
Look at Waco for instance. I'm not a fan of cults like the Branch Davidians, but the use of military-grade hardware like small tanks against a compound that is guarded by a bunch of yokels with at best automatic weapons is a great cause for concern. What most people don't know is that Waco was so badly screwed up that it had to be deliberate. It is not a conspiracy theory to say that the FBI and other agencies wanted to make an example out of them because they had something like 6 months to a year where David Koresh walked everday to wal-mart for supplies. I come from a federal law enforcement family and both my parents agree that in light of how many opportunities they had to NOT make an explosive situation it was literally criminal what the feds did. Same goes for Ruby Ridge.
The majority of police working in these areas don't care about your freedom or your privacy anymore. If they did they'd have given up on bullshit like the Clipper Chip and export regulations. We live in a society in which it is not feasible to keep our technology under wraps. It would be trivial for Al Qaeda to smuggle PGP out of our country; all they'd have to do is get someone inside our country, buy a single copy and send it from a public library to the Middle East.
We can only lose by listening to these security chicken littles because if we did everything we could to make our country secure, we'd resemble a slightly right-wing version of the Soviet Union. There would be no public internet access, no freedom of mobility, no right to keep and bear arms (which saves more lives than all cops in America combined), no right to security in your house and person, no freedom of association, and probably no property rights either. I won't live like that and I consider anyone who would to be worthy of death. They aren't human and because they reduce themselves so low they are a disgrace to our species. Not that I advocate murdering them, but rather I only laugh my ass off at them when they get hurt or killed. Good riddance, we need more people that won't change their lives to accomodate the terrorists, whether they're associates of Al Qaeda, have a General Services rank or call themselves Representative or Senator.
Government can't protect you preemptively, that is the indirect moral of this story. The police can pick up the pieces and get justice, but that's usually about it. Here's a novel thought, let's legalize assassinating terrorists. But this was never about terrorism and national (or is it fatherland) security, it was about big government justifying its Cold War level of control over the people. The worst parts of Communism aren't dead, they're festering in the White House and most of the law and order Republican types can't see that they've already lost. Bob Barr was kicked out because he had the audacity to call out Bush on issues like TIPS where he said, "this program smacks of the very fascist and communist governments that we have faught for so long."
So it's not healthy to be a true patriot and political traditionalist in America anymore. You call for a modern form of the government we started out with (in other words, nothing like slavery) and you're called idealistic, short-sighted and soft-headed. The irony of it is that the true hard-headed people have always advocated limited government and a simultaneously isolationist and Machiavellian foreign policy. We'd be a lot more secure if we minded our own business and made people pay handsomely in blood for every single violent transgression against us. For example we'd have fewer problems with Saudi-funded terrorists if after every such attack against us, the CIA sent its SOG commandos into Saudia Arabia and blew up a few civilian targets. You want respect in war and politics? Show that if you have to choose between doing the right thing and surviving that the former never gets in the way of the latter.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Email encryption is intended to keep third parties out of private communication. With PGP nothing stops the other side from divulging his end of the conversation to others. Sure some corporate mail clients may try to mark mails unprintable, unsaveable and what not but that won't defeat a digital camera or even a Bic and piece of paper. Encryption just allows Bob and Alice to have a conversation with reasonable assurance Eve isn't listening in.
DRM is something else altogether. DRM is intended to allow a sender to control what a recipient can do with information. In this case, Alice is trying to use encryption to mark information for Bob's eyes only (on Bob's Alice approved OS or Bob's Alice approved player) regardless of how Bob feels about it. This is absurd. If Bob can see it then Bob can copy it. DRM's only true effect is to create varying degrees of inconvienience for Bob.
Is not at all hypocritical to favor technological means for privacy while being opposed to technological means on control. Email encryption: Privacy. DRM: Control.
Feel free to suggest people we should interview.
- Property tech/entertainment-related Corporations that are in imminent danger of violating your nebulous and ill-conceived notion of whatever defines "privacy rights" this week..
Here's a novel idea:
Interview *anyone* who does not fit your ideological mold, perhaps even from the complete opposite side of a relevant debate. Perhaps even ( shock ) someone who actually knows something about the law.
For example, try the General Counsel for any one of the most-hated-by-harvard-hippies Evil/Globalist/Symbol-Of-The-Man/Pro-Intellectual
BMG, EMI, Genentech, Microsoft, Sony, Vivendi, Monsanto, Oracle, the list could go on quite a while. Pick one. Call the General Counsel, or assistant general counsel, or 4th-tier paralegal in accounts receivable - anyone would be better than these idiots you trot out to talk about issues they are not qualified to have a meaningful opinion about.
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
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=H5qE
Version: PGP 8.0.2
qANQR1DDDQQJAwKQORxFJ2eXpGDSwC8BX+3gT6C1eWdjGZc
Fv09JDOd3KLv1TXDs/bPdGLh5NQjjn8LK
H9g30N+9CSAovfMziE6m4CY61Gt+JmYfd
5SHtv5A80W34/A0y8ML/g+dhI4Kpfh1vm
CbPtlL2BfHayS69CAMPB2713nY5BC1x0E
MemlfqeANC5g8VaboKZa09BYgawx2Q==
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
I think that is a perfectly sensible idea (disregarding the "idiot" part of your submission) that I will pass on to the Greplaw editors.
Regards,
Mikael
Pawlo.com
Gosh this is offtopic but here goes....
There is no right to drive in the US. It is a privilege imparted to citizens of the various states by the state's government. As such, the state may regulate conduct and licencing with regard to driving.
Too bad, so sad. No veils if the state says "no." The Supreme Court has held on numereous occassions that states have the right to protect their citizens. Where religous freedom contradicts state edicts, the SC looks to see if the edict is a right or a priviledge. Where it is only a priviledge, the state always wins.
Driving is a privilege. Enjoy it.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
You're right. It's the hardest code to debug. The United States Code, I mean.
/. had a spell checker. :)
If you take a body of 100 Senators and the House with several hundred, most with no experience in law, writing laws every day, it makes for buggy code. Even when they mean well.
Think about if you had the in-house lawyers writing your programs. Think they'd run?
That's why you get laws about encryption that treats it as a munition. Minds that do not understand a subject crafting a law in a way that does not adequately deal with the problem.
Gee, I wish
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
I doubt that most people will get that joke to it's full extent. :)
FRA: STFU GTFO
I've had PGP for quite awhile, but it's not very useful to me for sending e-mail because I don't know anyone else who uses it. I coudln't imagine trying to explain to my computer-challenged friends how encryption works and why it should always be used.
Even if a standard encryption system for e-mail was created it's highly likely the government would require it to have several back doors.
I'm just saying that PGP has done nothing to facilitate terrorism. If terrorists really wanted encryption, they could have used it at any point, regardless of PGP's existence. And anyway, historically it seems that terrorists never really used electronic encryption for most of their planning.
It seems there is a real need both for strong, open-source cryptographic solutions for VoIp applications and some kind of open-source hardware for telephone communications. Open source because presumably the problem with current telephony encryption is that its closed source implementation has made it easy for the government to crack, as Schneier points out.
Since PZ once wrote an PGPfone for encrypted VoIP communications I'd really like to hear his opinion on this topic.
Personally, I like "ordinary" interviews over the "high profile" types.
Sure, their responses may not be polished, and sometimes their reasoning isn't completely solid. They're ordinary people who have in some way, shape, or form, been profoundly (and sometimes adversely) affected by cyber law/policy.
I'd rather listen to Joe Schmoe rant about the bogus cease and desist letters the RIAA is sending him over a silver-tongued RIAA lawyer any day of the week.
As govs store more fingerprints, the odds of making identity mistakes increase enormously. So far, nobody cared about the relibility (or lack thereof) of fingerprint systems, since only criminals are fingerprinted. Once everybody is on file, it is sure to be a whole different story. If you are living on the west coast and gets picked up for a murder on the east coast, it may be possible to explain it away, but what if you live in the same neighborhood as the victim? So, eventually, all the information that is stored, will become full of entropy and noise and will be useless as a law enforcement tool.
Oh well, what the hell...
Nice to see that Phil is still waving the banner for privacy rights, especially in light of the Patriot bill and other "anti-terrorism" legislation. Check out for some great alternative news articles.
# Could [open source licenses like the GPL] have been an alternative for PGP instead of making it freeware?
There is a place for products under different licenses. There is a place for products under the GNU GPL, also cryptographic products. However, GNU GPL is not enough for everyoneâ(TM)s needs. Some software needs to be sold for profit. Some software can not depend on hobby-programming conducted on weekends and other spare-time by programmers having other day-jobs. There is a place for that. But PGP needs more focused development than that.
I'd really like to know how he feels about the GnuPG project, in that case.
It also kind of bothers me that he seems to think that the GPL prevents you from selling your code.
"So I haven't a clue where they get the idea that they need to wear a veil over their face"
These women do it because women from this part of the world have historically been "two baggers" and wear a heavy, stout veil to protect passer-by's against actual harm from looking at their "less-than-attractive" faces.
It could actually burn the retina, so its a good thing.
"A person should be free to encrypt data, but not a company? "
I think the objection is not that companies encrypt data as part of DRM, its that the law prohibits you from decrypting without authorization from the owner with DRM.
Protection, it seems, that is not available to individuals using encryption.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Giving away the source to your program doesn't prevent you from making a profit.
Repeat after me:
The source code isn't magic
The source code isn't magic
The source code isn't magic
A couple of favourites would be Ian Clarke (founder of the Freenet project) for a pro-freedom view (and the guy who runs CofE if you can track him down).
:o)
For an anti- or more preciley restriced- freedom viewpoint an interview with Parry Aftab of WiredPatrol (nee Cyberangels) would be interesting. Just beware that you won't get a word in edgeways - plesant but rather assertive
Beep beep.