1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

number of Netizens from signing their Usenet messages with their public keys (which just look like four or five lines of gibberish), partly as a badge of honor, and partly as a means of authenticating messages, important in a contentious group like alt.religion.scientology, where forgeries and personal attacks have created an atmosphere of suspicion. By now, the program is a de facto standard even though its first release was greeted with suspicion because so few home-built encryption systems had ever been any good.[18] Grady Ward's announcement on alt.religion.scientology that the program, used to encrypt his hard disk, had withstood a month's worth of cracking attempts by the court-appointed special master has also served to help its reputation.[19] (Ward, sued in 1996 by the Church of Scientology, was subpoenaed in September 1993, as part of the Zimmermann investigation, over a product he wrote called Moby Crypto, a 9Mb compilation of source code for a wide variety of cryptographic algorithms.)

Like the Internet itself, PGP flourished because its supporters understood that if the program were distributed widely enough there would be no central point at which its availability could be knocked out. As always on the Net, the owners and operators of the Internet service providers were the pressure points. But that is already a community large enough to make it difficult to secure universal cooperation. Systems like CompuServe, America Online, and even the WELL were successfully pressured to remove PGP from their systems at various times. But those are of minor importance compared to the number of public FTP sites around the world on university and other systems where both PGP and PGPfone remain accessible. There is no calling these programs back. If the government wants widespread use of encryption that has a backdoor by which it can gain access, its one chance is to hope that the program never becomes so easy to use that it attracts mainstream consumers. With Zimmermann poised to build a large, serious, and successful company around just such a product, that seems unlikely even though the patent issue was revived in early 1997 when Bidzos filed suit, alleging that Lemcom's license was not transferable to PGP Inc.

As they say on the Net, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.