Entrevista a Philip Zimmermann

(2ª Parte)

net.News: Do you know that in France you can spend 3 months in prison and pay a 48 thousand dollar fine just for having and using your PGP software? What do you think about that?
Philip Zimmermann: I think that’s terrible! I hope no one has gone to jail for using my software. Y’know, if you live in country that would send you to prison for encrypting your message, then ah, maybe that means that you need cryptography more than we need it in the United States. There are lots of countries in the world where you can be put to prison, or killed for using PGP. Perhaps in Iraq, or in Burma, if your country wishes to emulate those countries, then it can do so by imposing penalties for using cryptography. I would hope that your country would not wish to copy other police states. I would hope that you have a democracy here and that you would like to set a good example for other countries to follow and not use thos countries as an example to follow.

net.News: Can you explain to us, I can imagine, that you said that you were used to addressing the general public if you just wanted the general public to retain one idea, if you could explain why cryptography should be on their minds whether they use internet or not. What would you say?
Philip Zimmermann: Well as we move our lives into the information age, more and more of our lives become exposed to scrutiny by the government, or by any other powerful institution, and if we want to hang onto any privacy, we’re going to have to use cryptography - to protect our e-mail, to protect our communications, to protet our data storge. And this debate about cryptography, more than anything else is about the power relation between a government and it’s people. As we move into the information age, more and more of our lives is becoming mediated by electronic channels, and to the extent that happens, we should try and do something to protect the erosion of our privacy. If we send paper mail, it’s hard to intercept it because there’s so much of it and it takes so long to open everyones mail. But an e-mail can be filtered in mass, by automatic computers. And so if we want to protect the future of democracy in the information age, it is a small step from omnitience, to omnipotence in the information age.

net.News: Terrorists and criminals can use PGP. What’s your personal feeling about that?
Philip Zimmermann: Terrorists and criminals can use all kinds of technology. They can use automobiles. In the United States in the early part of the century, there were some criminals named Bonnie and Clyde, who used automobiles to rob banks. They would rob a bank and then get into their car and drive across 2 or 3 state lines in a few hours. The police could not easily follow them at the time. They were unprepared. No other criminals had used automobiles as effectively as Bonnie and Clyde had and so there was talk that maybe people shouldn’t be allowed to have cars, because these criminals could use cars to get away from persecution. Today, we value our cars and use them mostly to drive the kids to school, or to go grocery shopping. Most people use cars for benign purposes. Cars have mixed effects on society though - they cause air polution, they cause dependancy on foriegn oil ... and so anytime you look at technology it has mixed effects on society. Cryptography is like that. Mostly it has benign effects, but there are some cases where it can have harmful effects. I think if you look at the big picture, you have to take the average, and the average come down on the side of cryptography.

net.News: As a citizen, how did you get the pull (?), and the energy to make PGP? Was it a game, or was it some idea of what could be good?
Philip Zimmermann: It was difficult. I worked on little areas of PGP for several years in the course of doing other projects. But the main effort of developing PGP took six months of 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, and I missed 5 mortgage payment on my house. I came very close to losing the house. And then of course after that there was the period of going through criminal investigation. So it was fairly difficult, but I did it because of the political resons. I did it because of the benifits to society. I felt that the technology trends were taking us into an Orwellian future, where the government would become too powerful, too omniscient, and could be tempted to abuse that power - because of surveilance tehnology of all our electronic communications.And so it appeared that also the government may be moving to outlawing cryptography, and then if I didn’t give PGP away, and get it widely disseminated, it may become illegal to do so. So that’s why I did it.

net.News: And you think cryptography is deregulated (?), what will happen in 10 years? If it’s being heavily controled by the state now, if the decision is to control it. If the decison is against what you want, what’s going to happen? What will be a very pesimistic .......?
Philip Zimmermann: I think that if cryptography is controled the way out government wants to ontrol it, and I guess the way your government wants to control it also, is that advances in technology will move us so far into a surveillance society that every aspect of our lives will be observable by the government. Every financial transaction that we make, every bit of travel that we do, every conversation that we have, will be surveiled and analysed. Not because the government is interested in every individual, but because the computing power will be there to simultainiously analyse the conversations and recognise our words in real time. Voice recognition technology is in a very advanced state now and over the next decade we’ll, it will become, resourse will become available to the governemnt to simultainiously monitor all telephone conversations and analyse what is said. This is a terrible temptation for any government, and could lead a good government to become a bad governmen. And so if you wish to protect your society from allowing your government to go bad because of the irresistible temptation of omnitience, then I think you need to use cryptography.

net.News: You made something called PGPFone, can you talk to us about that?
Philip Zimmermann: Yes, I have some software that transforms your computer, or your notebook computer into a secure telephone. It is called PGPFone and it turns a multi-media PC into a secure phone by, it has a microphone and speakers, on your computer - all computers today have a microphone and speakers now and a fast modem, and you talk into the computer, it digitizes and encrypts your voice, and sends it out through the modem, and then at the other end, the steps are reverse by the same software running on another computer. So with PGP phone I can whisper in you ear, even if your ear is thousand kms away.

net.News: It is actually like the medieval sound systems in the cathedrals, so you could confess yourself, and .... Philip Zimmermann: Yes, but no one can hear in between.

net.News: Can you tell us what you think about the S-grow system?
Philip Zimmermann: Well "key escrow" is a system proposal by our government, and your government as well, to make it so that anyone who uses cryptography trust put a copy of the cryptographic keys in a data-base for the government to use for wire-tap purposes. And cryptogrphy experts mostly think this is a bad idea, an people who are active in human rights, also think it’s a bad idea. It puts, well in addition to having extremely difficult technological problems, it’s too much power in the hands of the government. It puts big brother inside your telephone.

net.News: You told us that you were moved today by the fact tht you were pretty moved that the talks today took place in the same place that the Vietnam peace talks ocurred. Can you link these 2 events?
Philip Zimmermann: I think the ... that the, the intractibility of those peace talks and how difficult it was is comparable to the great gulf that separates the two sides in this debate here. It’s difficult to achieve compromise on the subject. We could have any talks like this, and I don’t know hether compramise is possible.

net.News: And do you think the two subjects are comparable?
Philip Zimmermann: Well certainly the Vietnam war was important to the people of Vietnam, an to the United States, and earlier it was important to your government. The use of cryptography world-wide in the information age, will enable grass-roots political organisations to operate in a democracy so that they can oppose unpopular wars in the future.Our government surveilled protestors, of the Vietnam war, and by surveiling the protesters, they were reducing the political effectiveness of that movement. For grass-roots political movements to operate in a democracy, I think it’s important to reserve the freedom of debate and the freedom of political organization, and we’re going to need cryptography to do that because of the increases in technological capabilities to surveil.

net.News: Someone on the debate today seems to which you answered to, seemed to say that actually the government’s watch on e-mail, shows that there is a big amount of innocent messages on... what do you think of it as a teaching (?)......what does it mean?
Philip Zimmermann: I’m not sure that I understand your question... are you saying that most e-mail messages are innocent?

net.News: Yes, and teaches that the government are going to....how to read. Philip Zimmermann: They have computer to do that. It’s easy for the government to read thousands of innocent messages.

net.News: So, could you explain how they read? What is the mechanism of reading a message by a computer? How do they check what is an innocent message, and what is a non-innocent message?
Philip Zimmermann: Computer are able to sift through millions of messages, at a time to look for politically subversive key words.So that they can separate the interesting messages from the boring messages.If a human had to do this, there would be safety in numbers, we would just have so many messages that were of no interest to the goverment , that the government would not attempt to read them all. But because of computer technology, that government or anyone in posession of these computers, and filtering the e-mail can automatically search for, and find all of the interesting messages, and they might be interesting because of criminal activity, but they may also be interesting to the government because they are from the political opposition.

net.News: One more question. Why did the federal government drop the case in 1993?
Philip Zimmermann: They dropped it in this year - January.

net.News: Sorry.... January 96?
Philip Zimmermann: The prosecuter would not tell us why the case against me was dropped except under the condition that we would not disclose it to anyone else. I would not agree to this condition, and so the prosecuter would not tell me the reason for dropping the case. However, me defence lawyer agreed not to disclose it to anyone else, and that includes me, and so my defence lawyer knows why, but he can’t tell me because I won’t agree to keeping it a private.

net.News: What do you think... have you got some ideas?
Philip Zimmermann: Well, there were, I mean, the case had many problems of evidence, there was also severe constitutional problems if this case were prosecuted. I think it would be a constitutional test case for freedom of the press. I should be able to publish things domestically in the United States without going to prison for it.

Leia a primeira parte da entrevista.