"PRZ a nazi" to be retracted

[Philip Zimmermann <prz@acm.org>]

The Sunday Telegraph of London printed a story last Sunday about neo-nazis
using PGP to encrypt their communications.  The story said that PGP was
devised by an American neo-nazi sympathizer.  As the creator of PGP, and
a human rights activist, I was outraged by such a defamation from a major
newspaper.  I called my lawyer Phil Dubois, who seemed to look forward to
having some fun with this newspaper.

Not wanting to wait around till the morning, and slow lawyers, I called
Robin Gedye, the reporter in Bonn who wrote the story, at 7am Monday morning
Bonn time, and woke him up at home.  I introduced myself and told him how I
felt about it.  He had never heard of me, the Clipper chip, the controversies
of cryptography, and knew nothing about PGP outside of the couple of
sentences in his story that mentioned PGP.  He said it wasn't really so bad,
because he didn't specifically identify me by name.  One can imagine the
effectiveness of that excuse with me.  I then went into some detail with him
to bring him up to speed.  I also called his editor in London, who also had
never heard of me or PGP.

After some checking, they discovered that the Daily Telegraph, a related
newspaper, had run an article about my case just a week before.  They also
found about 20 recent articles on me in the UK press.  The editor said that
my story "checks out".  It was good to know that they now believed that I
was not a neo-nazi after all.

Anyway, Mr. Gedye says that the Sunday Telegraph will print a retraction
next Sunday.  Not just a little retraction, but a whole article on the
subject, written by Mr. Gedye himself.  I'm glad to see that this probably
means that he will dig into the subject more, in order to write such an
article.

I guess this means maybe I'll find some other things to occupy Phil Dubois's
time.

  -Philip Zimmermann
   23 Jan 96