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."

Comments

Re:Better than Aimee Deep

[mpawlo]

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

Re:Zimmerman's contradictory opinions

[mpawlo]

That is a good observation I should have made myself during the interview. However, I never posed a question in this respect - my mistake. Reading only from the transcript you may not reach the conclusion you suggest. Mr Zimmermann spoke of both DRM and encryption as problems for the future access to archives. If he hosts double-standards the way you suggests regarding DRM and enryption, I can not tell.

I do not think Mr Zimmermann is corporate-hostile in general, though, since he makes his living selling his knowledge to companies striving to protect their data.

Regards,

Mikael

Re:Zimmerman's contradictory opinions

[Jade E. 2]

Once you get an e-mail and read it with PGP, you can do anything you want with it. You can copy-paste it into a Word document, you can forward it to a million-member Yahoo mailing list, anything you want

Actually, PGP (the new-ish versions, anyways) has an option when encrypting to only allow the decrypted message to be displayed in PGP's 'Secure Viewer', which prevents you from copying or saving the information (and, optionally, displays it in a grey on slightly-lighter-grey color scheme to try to prevent Tempest attacks). It also has other properties, such as preventing the message from being written to swap/page files (and windows hibernation files).

Of course, you can still just re-type it yourself, but it is distinctly DRM-like in that it requires extra effort to defeat the security, while not really offering any more protection. Of course, the difference is that when receiving a PGP message, the recipient generally *wants* the data to remain secure, and in DRM's case the recipient generally doesn't.