Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)

> In 2013, an article on "Zimmermann's Law" quoted Phil Zimmermann as saying "The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier"

A well-intentioned ideal from a bygone era.

The biggest issue of using PGP was using PGP. You were pretty nerdy to be on the internet back then, but even then using PGP was beyond what the majority of people wanted to do. Exchanging keys was problematic. Writing text in one app, encrypting in another app, copying encrypted back to an email was just tiresome.

I'm still glad that it existed as its mere existence seems to have pushed things in the right direction as far as protecting everyone's ability to use encryption if they chose. It just never became the panacea it was envisioned to be.

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