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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."
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
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
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.
Heh, yeah. I've used that argument myself in a number of discussions, when I felt like making assorted security schemes look mildly silly. The idea that decrypting a rot13-encrypted message is a violation of the DMCA is one of the better examples of the absurdity of it all. And pointing out that rot26 is just rot13 applied twice (so decrypting rot26 is also a violation of the DMCA) adds a whole new level of fun to the absurdity.
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It's even more fun to post the couple-line C program that does xor encryption with another file, and point out that not only is this an unbreakable encryption scheme, but you can also use it to show that any file is an encryption of any other. Thus, your message and mine are both encryptions of any handy pornographic image, and the little xor program will quickly produce the decryption key. This tosses a really fun monkey wrench into any scheme to outlaw pronography in any digital medium.
There's a lot of absurdity flying about here
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
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...
right to keep and bear arms (which saves more lives than all cops in America combined)
That's a new one on me. Maybe you should check your facts -- looks to me like the U.S.A. has the highest murder rate out of any country in the world. Other countries that don't have gun control seem to be able to keep their citizens from dying some other way, I guess.