You can do anything, but lay off my PGP.
Responding to a query I’d posted in several encryption-related newsgroups, he explained in an e-mail why PGP meant so much to him. Confessions were just part of the story:
In the history of Anglican pastoral care[care], there is a strong tradition of the use of the letter as a means of spiritual guidance. Actually this tradition goes deep into the roots of the Catholic Church. Some of the books regarded as “spiritual classics” are compilations of correspondence between a person and their spiritual director. Until the advent of PGP, e-mail was not a suitable place for such correspondence. It’s one thing to have your correspondence published 100 years after the fact; it’s quite another to run the risk of having your personal thoughts posted to a Usenet newsgroup or read by the sysop of a BBS. Now they know that even if they hit the wrong button and send their e-mail to the wrong place, it is secure.... Legislation that would make encryption illegal or require a mandatory backdoor would totally compromise any trust in e-mail or any other form of electronic text system such as word processors.
Father Morton’s respect for privacy came through when I asked for examples of confidences that people had shared with him by way of PGP: “No matter how I disguise the facts,” he told me, “even if I were to create a fictitious person, someone somewhere would believe that they were reading the details of their life story.” And so he was vague, other than to say, to give an idea of the gravity of what he heard, “Thoughts, dreams, hopes, as well as lust, anger, and hatred. Sometimes, actually oftentimes, there are things that you wouldn’t even tell your spouse. Our lives are based on trust.”
Thanks to PGP, Father Morton could maintain that trust not only with people locally in Woodstock, New Brunswick, but with Netfolk from thousands of miles away.
Some people met him in newsgroups. “We’ll have an exchange of e-mail on a specific topic,” he said, “and at one point it will become evident that I am a priest.” He neither hid nor played up his occupation. Upon learning it, he said, the Netter at the other end “may wish to change the topic and enter into a brief correspondence about a particular question. That conversation might last one or two posts and is usually, though not always, in PGP.” In addition, he corresponded with a very small group of people regularly about significant events in their lives. These conversations were always in PGP.
“Before PGP,” Father Morton said, “e-mail was guarded in its content. A typical e-mail exchange might be to set up a phone conversation or meeting or discuss issues in very general terms. Now, at least in a few cases, the PGP mail is much more open in its content, and as a result the e-mail pastoral relationship can be much more productive.”
Father Morton was not alone in his use of PGP to protect personal secrets. For example, the Samaritans, a group devoted to talking people out of suicide, said it would accept PGP-encrypted messages.
“The Samaritans,” announced a Usenet post, “have always taken the confidentiality of callers extremely seriously. Indeed the most frequently asked question within the movement about our e-mail service is, ‘What about confidentiality?’” Surely, in an era when more and more communications happened to be electronic, it would be folly to deny reliable encryption to the Samaritans and the people they helped. Although the Samaritans felt more confidence about the security of unprotected e-mail than did Father Morton, they understood an important truth: perceptions mattered as much as anything. If their correspondents lacked faith in the confidentiality of e-mail, they couldn’t write as freely. And, as I saw it, they might not be as open to rescue. If Washington banned PGP, if it replaced it with an inferior, Clipperish arrangement, the Samaritans just might not be as successful as with truly secure encryption.
Privacy wasn’t just for confessions and for suicide prevention. It was also for teenagers. Donna—she supplied her real name but I’ll protect her with a pseudonym—lived in Florida and was a seventeen-year-old junior in high school who was already using PGP. She e-mailed me: