gence agencies have access to good cryptographic technology. So do the big arms and drug traffickers. So do defense contractors, oil companies, and other corporate giants. But ordinary people and grassroots political organizations mostly have not had access to affordable military grade public-key cryptographic technology. Until now. PGP empowers people to take their privacy into their own hands. There's a growing social need for it. That's why I wrote it. (Zimmerman) Signatures The most important benefits of encryption have been conveniently overlooked by the government. If everyone used encryption, there would be absolutely no way that an innocent bystander could happen upon material they find offensive. Only the intended receiver of the data could decrypt it (using public key cryptography, not even the sender can decrypt it) and view its contents. Each coded message also has an encrypted signature verifying the sender's identity. The sender's secret key can be used to encrypt an enclosed signature message, thereby "signing" it. This creates a digital signature of a message, which the recipient (or anyone else) can check by using the sender's public key to decrypt it. This proves that the sender was the true originator of the message, and that the message has not been subsequently altered by anyone else, because the sender alone possesses the secret key that made that signature. "Forgery of a signed message is infeasible, and the sender cannot later disavow his signature (Zimmerman). Gone would be the hate mail that causes many problems, and gone would be the ability to forge a document with someone else's address. The government, if it did not have ulterior motives, should mandate encryption, not outlaw it. Conclusion As the Internet continues to grow throughout the wor...
