Attitude and Assumptions

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In the course of all the discussion here, I have seen a number of implicit
attitudes and assumptions that irritate me. This is a short rant to air my
irritation.

The first thing that bugs me is what I'm calling Crypto-Correctness. I
don't know a single person on cypherpunks who is against privacy, or is
against the notion that in the information society, keeping and bearing
crypto is an inalienable human right. Politically, I'm a Lockeian, and put
privacy up there with Locke's basic trio of life, liberty, and property. As
part of this, I fight the stupid notion that because there are bad people
out there, rights should be abridged. 

Crypto is a tool, and nigh any useful tool can be misused. If we let that
fact stop us from making tools, we'd be using nerf axes and dressing in
bubble wrap. If we let the fact that bad guys are using our stuff bother us
too much, we'd be against privacy.

Here at PGP, we like to make hay out of the fact Burmese freedom fighters
use PGP. A while ago, Tim May sent out something in which he stated that
Hamas uses PGP, making the very valid point that one person's freedom
fighters are another person's terrorists. He implied that they're not using
just to tell each other where the best hummous shops are, and I don't doubt
it. I like to say (now that I'm no longer an arms maker) that we are like
the Red Cross in that the Red Cross gives medical attention to everyone,
regardless of their moral worth; we supply privacy software to everyone,
regardless of their moral worth. In the days when crypto was a munition, I
used Winchester as a metaphor, complete with Sarah's cute bungalow.

In its milder forms, Crypto-Correctness thinks that if a bad guy is using
crypto, then it's a mitigating factor on what they're doing. I can see that
it might come from not liking tack-on laws like the clause in the present
bill that makes using crypto to hide a crime illegal. This is deplorable.
But using crypto doesn't make something good.

In some of its other forms, it pushes into what I perceive as
Crypto-Socialism. We just shrug if suicide bombers or paparazzi are using
crypto, but if a property-owner wants to use it, you can just hear the
sharp intake of breath. If that property-owner is Big Business, there are
howls of indignation. I get the impression that some people think crypto
should only be produced by non-profit organizations for the use of
non-profit organizations, or those that had the common decency to get their
profits illegally. 

The next thing that bugs me is that the government has us so scared of our
shadows that we look askance at anything that might make crypto
mass-market. Right now, crypto is rocket science. Many of the people who
need it most are only going to understand it after years of
acclimatization. The sorts who inhabit the nightmares of tech-support
people are going to take at least one more turn of the wheel of Maya to get
it.

I think a lot of people here think that blade guards on crypto in any form
is stark moral evil. You lost your data? Good. Shows you're not worthy. You
shouldn't have data anyway. Information is property, and property is theft.
In the crypto-anarchist future, after the withering away of the state, you
won't need property anyway. I suppose we'll all just eat e-cash.

I really believe that this panicked, bunker-mentality fear of anything that
might complicate the system with blade guards is doing the cause of freedom
a sever disservice. Business people are subjected to a lot of the asinine
annoyances and minor evils that government brings, too. If we get them on
our side, they will be a powerful ally.

I believe that the central thesis of crypto-freedom is that it doesn't
matter if a document is on paper or in a text file; it doesn't matter if a
conversation is on the phone or in a restaurant. The medium doesn't matter.
My papers and effects have the same protection on a disk as on paper itself.

We all know that deployment is the key. But real deployment means deploying
to people who don't know how their toaster works, too. If we don't solve
this problem, we'll get hit with the backlash. Just you wait, once crypto
becomes trendy, there will be a Time cover story with some headline like,
"How Much Privacy is Enough? Who's Really After You, Anyway?" and in it
will be sob stories about how people lost their passphrases, were
blackmailed by employees (ask me, I have real-world tales of this), or
can't decrypt their backups. Congress will have hearings, and they aren't
going to be fun to watch. Is trying to head this eventuality off (yes, I
believe it's inevitable) really the work of Satan?

The last thing that really, really bugs me is the hostility that's directed
towards PGP Inc. because now we're an Inc.

The core group of people who are here are the same people they always were,
they're just being paid now. I'd love to be independently wealthy and do
this for the crypto-anarchist, non-profit joy of it, really I would. But
you know, as the great crypto-socialist Balzac said, "behind every great
fortune, there is a great crime" so I suppose we must be up to no good.

This is a blues riff, so let me tell you how we've paid our dues before I
get to the chorus:

We published our source code. One of our potential partners said and I
quote, "Are you mad?"

We stand firm on the issue of No Weak Crypto. A noted GAK proponent asked
me at a conference, "Aren't you folks going to do an export version?" I
replied, "Sure we are." This person asked, "When?" I said, "The day after
the law changes." 

We put out a freeware product, hoping people will upgrade to the for-pay
version. If you're thinking of your own startup, let me give you some
investment advice: the crowd who thinks the X-files is a documentary
doesn't upgrade to the for-pay version.

We started an IETF working group that will take our core technology and put
it out for anyone to use. They will own change control. We won't be able to
use any patents or intellectual property to enhance our business position.
We won't be able upgrade the protocol without a vote.

The only thing we offer as a selling point is our superb engineering and
our good name. The business version is funding the rest of the ball of wax.
Are you afraid we'll make a deal with the devil? I have two comments on that:


(1) I work in Silicon Valley. I tell headhunters, "no thank you" every
week. I took a pay cut to come here. I can get a 20% raise by going to
WebFoo any time I want. My options aren't worth what I would have gotten as
a layoff package had I stayed at Apple. If I send out an email message that
provides "technical support" to furriners, I could land in jail. I'm here
because I care. Ask the people here who left behind Cisco options at 40 if
they care.

(2) There's one surefire way to make sure we don't make any deals with the
devil. Buy the product. Encourage your friends, your mother to buy the
product. If you see someone who is using the freeware version, send them a
polite message to buy the product. Buy one and send it to your
congresscritter. If you don't, what you're saying is, "crypto-freedom is
very important to me, as long as I don't have to spend $49 on it." Convince
your employer that $119 isn't too much to pay for meta-introducers. Make
the crypto market so hot that someone competes with us by being badder than
us.

Oh, yeah, baby, I got them crypto-startup blues.

	Jon




- -----
Jon Callas                                  jon@pgp.com
Chief Scientist                             555 Twin Dolphin Drive
Pretty Good Privacy, Inc.                   Suite 570
(415) 596-1960                              Redwood Shores, CA 94065
Fingerprints: D1EC 3C51 FCB1 67F8 4345 4A04 7DF9 C2E6 F129 27A9 (DSS)
              665B 797F 37D1 C240 53AC 6D87 3A60 4628           (RSA)


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Jon Callas <jon@pgp.com> writes:
> In the course of all the discussion here, I have seen a number of
> implicit attitudes and assumptions that irritate me. This is a short
> rant to air my irritation.

[bucko big snip]

Well, it was a nice rant, Jon.  Most of it was even crypto-correct :-)

But the problem is you didn't address the point causing your perceived
hostilities.  Not once.

The point is Jon "GAK compliance meister" Callas, you're building in
GAK compliance.

Now we know that it is possible for you to have GAK compliance without
using it for that purpose, or at least to promise that at this stage,
promise sincerely even, it doesn't make any difference.  When
mandatory GAK is law, all you'll have done is to smooth the way for
it.  Your promises, and crypto-anarchic 'tudes won't amount to a stack
of cards.

Your wimpy sounding safegaurds and reasons why PGP Inc would have to
be bought out, all staff sacked etc. don't sound very reassuring.
Saying "over my dead body", doesn't really help us if we are realistic
enough to figure that you'll be dead, and we'll have GAK.  Personally
I'd sooner we didn't have GAK (and that y'all lived too).

Oh yeah, and the reason we're all "picking on you" is nothing,
absolutely nothing what-so-ever, to do with the fact that PGP is an
"Inc" now.

The reason that it appears to you that we're picking on you is that
we're trying to ram a few simple points through your skulls which we
consider may be significant points in the political wars potentially
leading up to mandatory GAK.

For example, major point #1: that by attempting to enforce GAK
compliance on the IETF OpenPGP standard you will make it easier, much
easier, major point this, listening?, much easier to introduce GAK,
because they can then do so interoperably with the OpenPGP standard,
which you're hoping will be #1 internet email application used by
netscape like 80% market dominance figures.

PGP Inc has easily within it's powers the ability to remove this easy
migration path for manditory GAK.


Point #2, is more of a technical point really: you seem to be mixing
key functionality to the detriment of security to provide a fully
functional corporate email snooping service.  Here's a meme to pass
around the office: 

	separate storage and encryption keys are just as important as
	separate encryption keys and signature keys.

This is also fairly important, as keys have different recovery
requirements, and different life time requirements.  Re-using
communication encryption keys for storage keys causes all sorts of
problems.  One of which is getting shouted at for being GAK compliant.
Oh yes, and email in your received folder is NOT a communication
anymore, it is now _stored_, and should therefore, if it is encrypted
be encrypted with said storage key.

Now, if y'all over there are such "live free or die" crypto-anarchist
martyr's that you've given up your cisco options, and taken a pay cut,
and resisted temptation for a 20% pay rise (and you very well may be
die hard crypto-anarchists for all I know, I've only met a few of
you), surely argument #1 means something to you:

   "attempting to enforce GAK compliance on the IETF OpenPGP
    standard you will make it MUCH easier for USG to introduce GAK"

So what's your problem, if skipping on a 20% pay rise isn't a problem,
why do you have to implement GAK compliance to provide small amounts
of additional functionality for corporate snooping, which isn't even
on your stated user requirement list.  As I demonstrated you could if
you figure this is necessary to the future of free crypto (though I
can't see that it is), implement most of the snooping functionality
without GAK compliance.  It's not as if people can't hack around the
whole damn caboodle anyway, as was stated as a plus point in earlier
PGP person post.  So why GAK compliance for that last couple of % of
enforceability on snooping.  Think of the lower enforceability as a
boon, you've got a technical reason to use to explain to little
brother why 100% snooping doesn't work that well without 24 hr video
cams surveillance and NSA style body cavity searches at the door.

I'd suggest you print the above document out and have a discussion of
it.  Get PRZ there too.  Let us all know the decision so we know
whether to start investing in stego applications in preparation for
fast-track inadvertently (being generous here, since your whinge) PGP
Inc assisted GAK.

Cheers,

And hang-loose, don't get up-tight, just say no to GAK compliance.

Adam
-- 
Now officially an EAR violation...
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

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A thoughtful essay by Jon Callas on the trials and tribulations of being a
crypto start-up company.

Before I get into commenting on parts of Jon's message, let me first make
some very general points.

First, I don't think PGP, Inc. is being picked on. It announced a new
product this month, one with obvious implications and resonances for and
with the whole key recovery/key escrow/GAK debate.

Second, for us not to pick it apart would be "out of character"
(considering past critical remarks directed toward Netscape (ask the
Weinstein brothers), toward Microsoft (ask the MS employees who mostly post
from non-MS accounts), toward Cybercash, toward First Virtual, toward
RSADSI, and on and on. (And the Cypherpunks list was not even in the lead
in picking on PGP for Business, as the comments by Bruce Schneier, Simson
Garfinkel, etc. show.)

Third, several of us have reititerated the basic point that *of course* an
employer or corporation owner has every right to insist that his employees
use a particular product, submit to searches of their breifcases, have
their phone calls monitored, wear funny costumes, and so on. Only a couple
of people have even hinted that the issue is some kind of "workers rights"
thing.

Fourth, though employers may wish to insist on this kind of message
recovery, there are obvious dangers. Not the least of which is that the
voluntary aspects may cease to be voluntary (in terms of the government
mandating archival of all corporation messages, analogous to requirements
for audit trails, OSHA compliance, receipts, cash register records, etc.).

Fifth, it thus behooves us to think about these issues. That there will be
issues to consider, and public debate, is shown by the comments here and
the comments from Schneier, Garfinkel, etc. And even Phil Zimmermann, when
discussing a very similar product from ViaCrypt, basically said
(paraphrasing from memory): "Call it what you like, but it violates the
spirit of PGP, so don't call it PGP." Amen to that.

(Personally, I'll be real disappointed if Chairman Phil sends us a
Zimmermann Telegram (TM) telling us that the ViaCrypt and PGP products are
actually not all alike. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.")

Sixth, besides all of these issues, there are interesting questions about
whether this form of "encrypting to a corporate key" is very useful or
addresses the right problem. (I happen to believe that the "what if Joe is
hit by a truck?" issue is better solved with other tools, and the "what if
Joe is sending corporate secrets outside the company?" issue is not at all
addresses with PGP for Business (as Joe will either stego encrypt, or, even
better, will just carry out gigabytes in a CD or DAT and use a non-company
account).

Anyway, I guess I don't need to comment paragraph by paragraph on Jon's
points. I'm happy that he's commenting here on the list.

- --Tim May


The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221   | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."



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> The last thing that really, really bugs me is the hostility that's directed
> towards PGP Inc. because now we're an Inc.

There is no hostility towards PGP, Inc.  It is just that many people
think your software contains a feature which has very bad consequences.
Incidentally, I heard a speech by Phil Zimmermann the day before PGP
5.5 was released.  He expressed deep concerns about key escrow,
epxressly including PGP products.  Think about it.

Personally, I think a corporation has the right to access their
employees' business communications, so as long as private messages
remain private, there CAK is no big problem (not that it is exactly
useful, either).  However, when you claim that you are reacting to
to non-existant public safety concerns, I wonder what the real agenda
is.

It is also surprising that you fail to recognize the difference
between communications keys and storage keys.

While I agree with the general points you make in your Crypto Blues, 
I also agree with what I am reading from others regarding paving the 
way for GAK.  This is probably because you didn't actually deal with 
those criticisms individually in your rant.

To say that you will draw a line somewhere down the road is 
ineffectual. It's not unlike the gun owners who won't join an 
organization, won't communicate with their elected representatives, 
and rely on "Well, if they come for *my* gun, they'll have to pry it 
from my cold, dead fingers!"  It's too late by then.  If and when it 
comes time for one or more of you to decide to quit rather than do 
what is wrong, it will be way too late.  I'm reminded of the 
far-left-liberal comic and actor Dennis whatshisname who, in a 
standup act, made reference to the "cold, dead fingers" view of some 
gun owners and said, "That'll work!"

Whoever it was who said that the capitalists would sell the 
communists the rope with which to hang them was right.  It is even 
worse in today's brain-dead business world where policy decisions are 
made by bean counters who can't see more than 90 days past their 
bottom line and have no visibility whatsoever of the rich component 
mix of that bottom line.  I have no doubt that if and when the time 
comes that the government puts out RFPs for ID chip implant systems 
or tattooing barcodes on our foreheads there will be no scarcity of 
companies lining up to get the contracts.  Free enterprise doesn't 
automatically confer intelligence, forward view, or an understanding 
of freedom and the long-term consequences of undermining it.

It is incumbent on everyone who favors individual liberty and
privacy to do everything possible to prevent the infrastructure for
GAK and other police state measures from being put into place.  Adam
Back is entirely correct in believing only in technical solutions,
not words.  It must remain technically difficult, even impractical,
for politicians and bureaurats to simply prescribe how mechanisms
put in place by well-meaning people will be used to invade privacy
and monitor communications.  The best defense against censorship is
a technological structure that defeats censorship before it starts. 
The best defense against the destruction of privacy is a
technological structure that makes invasion of privacy difficult or
impossible.  It is far better to have a system in which a
destructive proposal fits badly and threatens to cause innumerable
uncontrollable consequences than one which lays the groundwork for
the easy implementation of destructive proposals.

The risk-of-loss set of arguments is also in some ways a large red 
herring.  There is nothing particularly unique about crypto that 
makes the potential loss of information qualitatively different than 
countless garden variety risks with which people deal every day.  
May organizations have stopped backing up desktop PCs.  Most 
everyone tried to do those backups at one time, but as disk sizes 
and data volumes increased it became impractical in many 
organizations.  This represents a far greater risk than the loss of 
messages or files the same employees may keep in encrypted form, but 
there are no interest groups or government bodies trying to propose 
Desktop PC Escrow systems.

Many employees wittingly or unwittingly use the strongest crypto in
existence, from which there is *no* recovery under any circumstances
should the employee drop dead: wetware storage.  Rate of
technological change and increasingly full "plates" have combined to
reduce documentation to historic lows.  If a document becomes
obsolete, even false, virtually the moment it is completed, it is
less likely to be written.  If it's never written because its 
durability is in question or there is too much else to do, it can 
never be recovered except from the functioning mind of the custodian 
of the information, but no one is proposing "brain escrow."  The 
costs of dealing with the loss of an employee with a headful of 
unique knowledge are becoming an expected and largely unnoticed 
thing, like the expectation of a third world business that a simple 
action like fixing a piece of hardware may involve a large multiple 
of the time and money it would cost in any U.S. city.  And still the 
bean counters haven't a clue.

It is even quite common these days that when one of those custodians
leaves an organization there is insufficient staffing to make even a
feeble attempt to pick up what the departing person has left behind.
Rate of obsolescence aggravates this by making it seem easier to
just implement the next version or product than pick up the pieces
of managing the old one.  I've seen people depart, leaving a cube
full of diskettes, manuals and, presumably, notes, only to see the
organization move someone else with different job responsibilities
into the cube and never, ever, not even once retrieve or look at any
of the materials of the departed employee -- not their PC, their
files, their desk, their file cabinets, their manuals -- nothing.

Individuals can also wipe their mail files, wipe their disks, suffer 
disk failures, etc.  They can take the only copy of something home 
and die in a fiery car crash.  They can drop their laptops from 
heights more than the prescribed 2 inches.  It is not possible to 
list the ways in which information can be lost and/or compromised, 
ways with which key recovery cannot possibly attempt to deal.  Since 
many of those things happen all the time in the real world on a daily 
basis it goes unnoticed that the vast majority of them are dealt with 
by the people involved without comment and largely without noticeable 
adverse consequences, just as when smoking was common in offices it 
wasn't particularly noticed that most offices didn't burn down 
despite the widespread use of open flame and smoldering materials in 
tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of instances daily.

Loss of encrypted information is almost a non-issue in reality, 
somewhat like the non-issue of the risk of flying by scheduled 
airline.  Crypto, like airliners, increases the probability that a 
loss will be more noticeable by virtue of quantity, but has no 
inherent effect on the likelihood that a greater percentage of total 
information will be lost.  An employee generally exercises the 
same type of diligence in this area as in the myriad other 
areas where some thought and action must be directed at 
preventing catastrophic loss.  The motivation is the same, 
too:  retention of employment and avoidance of lawsuit.  An 
operations manager already has to figure out how to make sure that 
last year's backups will not only be physically safeguarded but also 
capable of being read and restored should they be needed, for 
example.  There is nothing more magic about "crypto" than there is 
about "backup" in this sense.

Crypto, like the Internet, is a mere conceptual hook on which the
ignorant (strongly represented in the so-called "news" media) can
hang a set of alarms and not necessarily needed solutions.  It's 
an umbrella under which those who have nothing better to do can 
collect a set of issues for conceptual amplification and 
synergistic alarm enhancement, obscuring the fact that many 
functional counterparts to those issues are in the fabric of 
everyday business work.  

The mere use of a computer involves a larger quantity and more
serious degree of "gotchas" than arise in the use of crypto on those
computers, and has for many decades. The manpower lost in the 10+
years it took us all to move past the 640K limit and the 1960's
technology of DOS on the PC platform probably exceeded what would be 
required to do brute force solutions of the worldwide Y2K problem.  

Imagine that someone had latched onto the business danger of loss of
source code in 1960 and had sensitized everyone to the issue to the 
point where this kind of discussion and debate were being conducted 
over the need for national and worldwide standards and mechansisms 
for commercial and government protection against the loss of source 
code.  Imagine the Congress of the U.S. effectively taking the 
position that businesses are too stupid to safeguard the source 
code that runs their enterprises and that the government must 
require the filing of copies of all source code in case anyone 
loses some.  Or that all compilers and source editors have 
source recovery features.  Would that have sounded reasonable at any 
time in the last 30-40 years?  Would it sound reasonable today?

Yes, some people and organizations have lost source code.  No, most
people and organizations have not lost their critical source code. 
Those that do tend to weed themselves out, just as those who tend to
make bad decisions and take self-destructive actions in any area of
life, business or personal, tend to reduce their own effectiveness 
and participation in the game.

GAK is different, of course, in that it brings the agenda of the 
politics of power into the fray, and thus crypto has become the 
subject of an array of efforts as disingenuous as the safety 
arguments of unions when fighting to preserve a completely obsolete 
and useless job function.  All of a sudden governments who never gave 
a rat's ass about the risks to commercial entities of losses of any 
other kind of information in any other context are falling all over 
themselves to promote GAK because they are suddenly overcome by 
altruism.  Right.  Or because they have had a revelation and have 
remembered that commerce is good for the country and government is 
supposed to be a means of providing stable legal and public 
safety structure and not an end in and of itself.  Sure.  

Government never misses a chance to take opportunistic advantage, and
the chance to treat crypto as something qualitatively different than
thousands of other business and personal privacy questions and
mechanisms is too good to pass up.  The opportunity for government
to gain access to information that just happens to be digital is of
far greater significance than any offered justification based on the
danger to businesses that they will be too stupid to assure their
own access to their own information or the danger to nations that a
few people or groups of people may be able to communicate in ways
that preclude surveillance.  The only thing that GAK is about is
government power over individuals and groups -- the gradual
conversion of citizens into subjects, just without all the trappings
of old-fashioned royalty and notions of the divine right of kings.  
Governments see this as an opportunity to gain access to private 
communications in ways that would never have been acceptable in the 
days of paper letters and envelopes.  Because politicobureaucrats, 
like ants, cooperate instinctively to concentrate power in the halls 
of authority we see mulitple facets to the attack on privacy, but 
they are only that -- facets of the same ugly stone.

If the best minds fall into step to build and facilitate the
mechanisms to destroy individual liberty because "someone will do
it," we are lost.  If "someone" does it, but the best minds are
working to make a police state technologically infeasible, we may
not see the light of freedom extinguished after all.  In the past
this battle was heavily influenced by material resources. 
Increasingly, the playing field is being leveled by technology.  The
likelihood that a small number of individuals can significantly
influence the balance has passed the threshold of credible
probability, witness Phil's PGP and numerous other developments. 
This likelihood is on an upward trend, but the forces of darkness
are also making better and better use of technology.  Every person
who can make a difference and isn't committed to individual freedom
is an effective participant in its destruction.  If we have to
explain to our children and grandchildren why they have microchip
transponders in their asses and all their communications are
archived by the government it will be a pretty weak justification to
say that we brought home the paychecks without interruption.

Thomas Junker
tjunker@phoenix.net

On Fri, 10 Oct 1997, Jon Callas wrote:

> In the course of all the discussion here, I have seen a number of implicit
> attitudes and assumptions that irritate me. This is a short rant to air my
> irritation.

I would hate to see your *long* rants ...................:^)

> The first thing that bugs me is what I'm calling Crypto-Correctness. I
> don't know a single person on cypherpunks who is against privacy, or is
> against the notion that in the information society, keeping and bearing
> crypto is an inalienable human right. Politically, I'm a Lockeian, and put
> privacy up there with Locke's basic trio of life, liberty, and property. As
> part of this, I fight the stupid notion that because there are bad people
> out there, rights should be abridged. 

I express it as private information is my property and I should have
whatever means necessary to protect it.  And as crypto can be directly
used only as a shield and not a sword, there are no reasonable arguments
against me using it.

> I believe that the central thesis of crypto-freedom is that it doesn't
> matter if a document is on paper or in a text file; it doesn't matter if a
> conversation is on the phone or in a restaurant. The medium doesn't matter.
> My papers and effects have the same protection on a disk as on paper itself.

This is really unexplored.  I would extend rights in the physical world
into cyberspace.  And you are right [in an elided section] that
corporations or businesses aren't thought of.  Most of the arguments
against intellectual property is toward releasing it where it is free, but
there is an equal or greater threat of charging for the information
without paying royalties.  There are vandals, but there are also thieves.

> We all know that deployment is the key. But real deployment means deploying
> to people who don't know how their toaster works, too. If we don't solve
> this problem, we'll get hit with the backlash. Just you wait, once crypto
> becomes trendy, there will be a Time cover story with some headline like,
> "How Much Privacy is Enough? Who's Really After You, Anyway?" and in it
> will be sob stories about how people lost their passphrases, were
> blackmailed by employees (ask me, I have real-world tales of this), or
> can't decrypt their backups. Congress will have hearings, and they aren't
> going to be fun to watch. Is trying to head this eventuality off (yes, I
> believe it's inevitable) really the work of Satan?

No, but I don't know if your solutions are real.  Does PGP 5.5 prevent
encrypting non-CAK, then reencrypting CAK to pass through the mailers?
GAK/CAK has lots of technical problems, and I don't know that you have
solved them.  You assume that someone like the boss in the Dilbert cartoon
is going to make this all work (or will they write the corporate
passphrase on their deskpad)?

I tend to be neutral to CAK, except that I can't think of an easy way to
create something that is not snake-oil (i.e. that is easy, doesn't
compromise security if the CAKeepers are dunces, and insures that data
encrypted is accessible by the TTPs).

> The last thing that really, really bugs me is the hostility that's directed
> towards PGP Inc. because now we're an Inc.

> We put out a freeware product, hoping people will upgrade to the for-pay
> version. If you're thinking of your own startup, let me give you some
> investment advice: the crowd who thinks the X-files is a documentary
> doesn't upgrade to the for-pay version.

The windows versions I have seen don't allow me to select algorithms (they
default to CAST, so how do I get 3DES or IDEA), and neither did the Linux
version - the beta segfaulted on at least one combination of algorithms. 
Are all these little problems fixed?  And if so, you had to modify the
source, so is there a diff file you are going to publish much less a press
release saying what is or is not fixed (I see the part about
batch-friendly, but is that there yet, and how would I use that - you
could put your manuals online). 

I can't even buy a license for the scanned version which I can at least
fix these problems.  I would pay the $49 for the license to use a working
Linux version.  Maybe you should add a license issuing page to your server
so I can click and get an digitally signed HTML license (with a physical
one to be mailed later if needed). 

But for now my choice is to take a chance on the $49 downloadable version
(will it be another $49 for a half-fixed version, and another $49 when
the IETF finishes with the spec and 6.0 meets it?).  Does anything happen
differently if it has problems and I report them?

By the way, I can't even download it - your server requires switching to a
port our firewall doesn't let through (9999) which I emailed your
webmaster about three months ago.  There are other common alternate ports
that are allowed.  So I can't even really get the $49 version, I must pay
$79 (or spend an hour creating an IP tunnel to a recognized US DNS-IP
address which is what I did last time - I might do that for the freeware
version but not to purchase something). 

So I don't know if any of the problems in the freeware or betas are fixed,
and I can't even download it from your website.  Some hostility to the
"Inc." might be from your consumer relations more than your philosophy.

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