The importance of encryption
State Secrets
"maddog" recalls some of the history of encryption and PGP and discusses why they should matter to everyone.
At a conference recently, I handed my business card to a young FOSS person, and as he accepted the card he pointed to the PGP ("Pretty Good Privacy") number on the bottom of my business card and asked, "What does this mean?" In the age of Wikileaks, PRISM, and XKeyscore, I find it disturbing that people do not know about PGP and its FOSS offshoot, GPG.
I have been dealing with the US government and issues with encryption for a long time. In the early days of commercial Unix, a lot of companies were shipping either a System V or a BSD version of Unix. Of course, both of these systems rely on encrypted passwords and both systems (at the time) also had a simple crypt(1) command for encrypting data.
Back then, I was working for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and the company was just about to ship its first Unix system for the VAX architecture, when our export department asked the fatal question: "Is there any encryption software in this product?"
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