The WWII P forgot

[Tiarnan O'Corrain]

> 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).

The problem with using PGP is traffic analysis. Essentially, if
osama at hotmail.com is sending PGP-encrypted messages, it's easy
to see where they are going, and where they are coming from. Since
PGP has distinguishable headers and footers, large-scale scanning
systems can pick them out and figure out the nodes. It's not necessary
to actually decode the messages to figure out that communication is
taking place. After that, human intelligence can take over.

Unfortunately, it seems that US human intelligence in the Middle
East/Arabic world is extremely poor. A recent report (before the WTC
atrocity), indicated that the US didn't have one Pushtu-speaking
field agent that would be capable of blending into Afghan networks.

Of course, PGP in connection with Stego could be an extremely
powerful tool, but that might be overkill.

CHeers

Tiarnan