The WWII P forgot

[Paul Mackin]

There was a report in the Washington Post a few days after 9/11 which
suggested that Phil Zimmermann developerof PGP and promoter of its free use
by all thoughout the world was having second thoughts. This was corrected by
Zimmermann. He has no regrets over making PGP widely available. Only sorry
in the same way Boeing is sorry over the way its airplanes may be used.
(doesn't know of course whether PGP itself was actually used but would of
been amazed to learn public private keys encyption had not been employed by
the terrorists).

P,


----- Original Message -----
From: "Tiarnan O'Corrain" <tiarnan.o'corrain at cmg.nl>
To: "Paul Mackin" <paul.mackin at verizon.net>
Sent: Friday, September 28, 2001 4:55 AM
Subject: RE: The WWII P forgot


> > Nice to be able to break bin Laden's code. PDP (pretty good
> > privacy) is hard
> > and expensive to break.
> >
> > P.
>
> PGP, if that is what Bin Laden used, is impossible to break
> without access to the secret decryption keys. Impossible may
> be too strong a word here, but it'll stand in for "would take
> all the computers in the world more than a thousand years", which
> is more accurate.
>
> I don't think anyone has actually accused Bin Laden of using
> PGP. What I heard was that he used steganography, the art of
> hiding a message in an unrelated piece of data. In the good old
> days, this meant using acrostics, or similar methods, in normal
> communications. Nowadays, it usually means hiding information in
> the least significant bits of an image file, or embedding it in
> a sound file.
>
> I am suspicious however, since people have been talking about Bin
> Laden's use of internet child pornography to hide his terrorism
> messages. Or perhaps he used Napster...
>
> In any case, it seems to fit too nicely with current legislative
> preoccupations about the Internet.
>
> Musing about Pynchon in this connexion, I'm at a lost to recall
> any cryptographic interest in his books, unlike, say Neal Stephenson's
> *Cryptonomicon*. Pynchon's codes tend to be more philosophical, like
> the lecture given by Jamf, where (memory failing me here) he talks
> of synthetic molecules the whisperings of the serpent; or the men
> playing with tarot cards when the bus stops for a break.
>
> Tiarnan