I couldn’t speak for other teenagers and their parents, but with my extremely intrusive mother, I use all the privacy devices I can get. I’ve kept extensive journals since second grade—she’s always read them and nosed around, no matter where I’ve tried to hide them. She’s opened letters from friends and pokes her nose into anything that she considers unorthodox; we don’t quite see eye to eye on many issues. I’m a good student, responsible, don’t drink or do drugs, blah blah blah, but she has continuously invaded my privacy over the years despite her lack of justification.
Two years ago I tried a locked drawer where I kept all of my papers, letters, and the like, but she has opened the drawer with my keys. So now I just do everything on the computer and encrypt/password it. I can see how some parents might justify searching their kids’ rooms—just as police can under circumstances justify searching homes.
But, Donna went on, if a child were doing something illegal, there “would be physical evidence.” That seemed clear: You could encrypt a diary full of unorthodox musings; you could not encode a marijuana stash.
I would have trusted Donna, but I still had mixed feelings about most teenagers using PGP without their parents’ sharing the keys. How long until Senator Exon ranted that the young would encrypt dirty bytes? In the end, however, just as with children’s use of the Net itself, PGP should be a family decision, not a federal one; Washington mustn’t turn into a giant version of Donna’s mother. Risks from a ban, even one limited to children, so outweighed the benefits. If Donna’s mother wanted to understand her daughter, then maybe she needed to spend less time doing a domestic-level KGB act and more time at a computer—seeing for herself what her daughter was up to. In the process she might understand Donna well enough to tolerate her opinions. She’d better learn to brook them; her daughter was almost eighteen, the age of adulthood in the United States. Soon many parents would be more comfortable with the technology, and then, family by family, parents could decide whether to be Big Mama or Big Daddy and look for PGP-encrypted files. It should be a family, not a government, matter.
If nothing else, parents themselves could use PGP to guard their own privacy. “I use PGP at home solely for keeping confidential information from prying eyes—for instance, from my son and my son’s friends, as well as for keeping their information in one central place,” said Joe Collins, an employee of an international investment bank based in New York. It guarded his burglar alarm codes, the codes to the family safe, all credit card numbers, and all passwords to software on the family computer. Yes, some popular software came with encryption, and certain people might have argued that home users such as Collins didn’t need PGP. But the encryption found in popular software was nowhere near in PGP’s league. In fact, Crak Software, a company in Phoenix, Arizona, even sold “password-recovery software” to crack popular programs such as WordPerfect, Word, Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, and Quattro Pro (for backup purposes).
AIDS activists especially understood the possibilities of good, strong encryption; victims of the disease, after all, were treated about as fairly as lepers had been in biblical times. In New York a group called ACT UP tried to get the public health officials to encourage labs to use PGP to protect the identities of patients. The officials liked the idea. The program died at the hands of a parsimonious governor; but sooner or later, I suspected, PGP would be used in one way or another to protect the privacy of AIDS patients, if it wasn’t already.
In the business area, the advantages of keeping PGP legal—and avoiding Clipperish solutions—were just as clear as at the personal level. “PGP is essential,” said Robert David Steele, a former CIA agent whose passion for legalized encryption and dislike of Clipper must have endeared him to many hackers.[[6.27]] “Security is the foundation for openness. In order for a world of open electronic exchanges actually to succeed, electronic persons have to know three things, all of which PGP supports: (a) that the person on the other end of the link is who he says he is, (b) that the information being received is genuine and not altered, and (c) that a digital cash payment will be forthcoming, assuming that this is part of the transaction.” Steele was not just talking about the benefits of PGP for business alone, but clearly it was among the major uses that he quite properly had on his mind here.
Many business people on the Net agreed. I was hardly surprised to read in the New York Times about the use of PGP “in what was apparently the first retail transactions on the Internet using a readily available version of powerful data encryption software designed to guarantee privacy.” A Philadelphia man had used PGP to scramble his credit card number and spent $12.48 and shipping costs on a compact disk with rock music from a New Hampshire company called Net Market. More benefits were to come. Already other companies were working on digital cash, which could let bits and bytes go out over the Net in ways that prevented them from being easily traced. They would be, in other words, just like dollar bills.[[6.28]] You could spend them without Big Brother knowing that you’d bought a Playboy, a Rush Limbaugh book, a condom, or whatever else might somehow cause your neighbors or your boss to take offense.
PGP also made sense for privacy protection within companies. An accounting firm in Palo Alto, California, for example, used PGP to guard backup tapes in case of loss or theft, and a Washington accountant relied on it for client communications.[[6.29]] And when Zimmermann himself asked online for PGP testimonials, a man with a telecommunications firm on the West Coast told him how much he loved it as an alternative to Clipper:
Once it becomes a standard, the competitive software industry will have no incentive to continue technical development in crypto. And then once Clipper gets cracked by outsiders or otherwise compromised, there will still be a lot of bureaucratic inertia protecting it and keeping the fact that it’s been compromised a secret.