Interview with Phil Zimmermann - Inventor of PGP
The place: We at India and Mr. Zimmermann at his California office, over Skype.
The time: 05:30am our time and 04:00pm his time, on the 29th of February, 2008, Friday.
The subject: PGP; Cryptography and its future.
J: Good afternoon Mr. Zimmermann! This is Jason from the ThinkQuest Team and we have here with us Namrita and our Assistant Coach Kishore.
PZ: Hello Jason. Glad to be here!
J: We'd like to interview you about cryptography and its future. So shall we start Mr. Zimmermann?
PZ: Sure
J: Our first question to you would be: Could you tell us what inspired you to take up this field of work? You know, that initial spark? Was it a passion from the beginning or did you happen to discover it chance?
PZ: Well, I've always been interested in cryptography since I was, may be, ten years old. But I became interested in the political side of cryptography during the 1980s when I was in the peace movement. I felt that the peace movement in the US needed to have some way to protect its data from government surveillance. With the invention of public-key cryptography in the late 1970s, I became even more interested in cryptography... In the 1980s I tried to think of ways of applying that to help grass roots political organisations.
J: We've heard and read a lot about PGP, but its always nice to hear it from the inventor himself. Do tell us in a few words what PGP is all about.
PZ: Yes! PGP is an e-mail encryption software package. I developed it in 1991 and released it on the internet. It spread all around the world and became popular. Soon after releasing it, it got the attention of the US government and they held the position that, that I had illegally exported PGP violating the export controls on military technology and so they tried to put me in jail for this and this had the unintended side-effect of making PGP more popular.
J: Sometimes people help us without their knowledge. We read somewhere that the idea of PGP struck you when you were part of a protest. Could you run us through what exactly ran through your mind then when you thought of the product? You know, that initial idea?
PZ: Well it wasn't that I was part of protest; it wasn't a single event. I was part of a political movement during the entire decade of the 1980s. I became interested in it around the middle of the 1980s, at the idea of doing it. Around 1984 is when I first started thinking about doing it.
J: So, is the current version of PGP what you had really envisioned back then?
PZ: Well, no! This is sixteen years after the first version of it. A lot has changed over the past sixteen years. There's a lot of new features. There's encrypted disk drives, there's new algorithms, there's all kinds of things.
J: So moving onto a slightly different scenario, what is your take on the eternal debate between personal privacy and national security?
PZ: Well, um, I think that in some ways personal privacy is tied to national security. I don't think that they are mutually exclusive. I don't think it's a zero sum game. I think the whole of society benefits from people having personal privacy and that is one aspect of national security. If people don't have personal privacy, it changes the whole of society, it undermines our democratic institutions and that is in effect a threat to national security.
J: What is your take on the Digital Rights Management scheme?
PZ: Well, I think DRM is a fool's errand. I think that its an unachievable goal. It's a problem that cannot be solved. If you publish a work and you want everyone to be able to listen to the music or watch the film or whatever it is, at some point it has to be decrypted so they can hear it or see it and it can be copied at that point after its been decrypted,. So DRM, is, you know, impossible. There are schemes that attempted to implement DRM but all of them can be broken.
The interview continues on the next page:
