A Pretty Good Story, from The Netly News

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

*********

http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1617,00.html

The Netly News Network (http://netlynews.com/)
December 8, 1997

A Pretty Good Story
by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)

        Phil Zimmermann had it easy fighting the U.S. government: At
   least everyone else was on his side. Today the legendary cryptographer
   and founder of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is finding that his latest
   adversaries are just as determined but much more diverse.

       Earlier this fall PGP drew fire for releasing PGP 5.5 with a
   so-called "message recovery" feature that a corporation could require
   users to turn on to let the boss read their e-mail. Then, when McAfee
   Associates announced last week it would buy PGP, formerly supportive
   privacy advocates screamed that the company's new owners were part of
   the "Key Recovery Alliance," a group of firms devoted to producing
   data-scrambling software easily snoopable by the government.

        Now the complaining may stop, at least for a while. The
   McAfee-PGP combo, called Network Associates, has dropped out of the
   alliance. "I never would have allowed my own company to join the Key
   Recovery Alliance," Zimmermann told me yesterday. "As soon as I found
   out about McAfee being a member, I tried to do something about it."

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