nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their e-mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their e-mail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity (Zimmerman). Until the development of the Internet, the U.S. government controlled most new encryption techniques. With the development of faster home computers and a worldwide web, the government no longer holds control over encryption. New algorithms have been discovered that are reportedly unable to be cracked, even by the FBI and the NSA. This is a major concern to the government because they want to maintain the ability to conduct wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance into the digital age. Pretty Good Privacy To stop the spread of data encryption software, the U.S. government has imposed very strict laws on its exportation. One very well known example of this is the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) scandal. PGP was written by Phil Zimmerman, and is based on "public key" encryption. This system uses complex algorithms to produce two codes, one for encoding and one for decoding. To send an encoded message to someone, a copy of that person's "public" key is needed. The sender uses this public key to encrypt the data, and the recipient uses their "private" key to decode the message. As Zimmerman was finishing his program, he heard about a proposed Senate bill to ban cryptography. This prompted him to release his program for free, hoping that it would become so popular that its use could not be stopped. One of the original users of PGP posted it to an Internet site, where anyone from any country could download it, causing a federal investigator to begin investigating Phil for violation of this new law. As with any new technology, this program has allegedly been used fo...
