The WWII P forgot

[Paul Mackin]

Good point. This was the reason I stopped using it. Drew too much attention.
Better, as always, just to blend into the background. Hide in plain sight.
The Purloined Letter.

        P.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tiarnan O'Corrain" <tiarnan.o'corrain at cmg.nl>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, September 28, 2001 9:52 AM
Subject: RE: The WWII P forgot


> > 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