An Excellent Interview with PGP Creator and Silent Circle Co-Founder Phil Zimmermann

We need to take an objective look at the damage since 9/11 and that would take into account self-inflicted wounds. The harm we have done to our society has come as a reaction to 9/11. The cost includes our expectations of our legal system and our civil liberties. I don’t think it is a partisan issue. We need to push back against this tide of surveillance. In my case, I create technology, so I do things that allow me to apply my skills and part of that is to develop technology tools that push back against a small subset of that problem.

– Phil Zimmerman

Om Malik of Gigaom has just released an excellent interview with Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP and co-founder of Silent Circle. In case you missed it, Silent Circle made the preemptive decision to shut down its encrypted email service last week after the Feds went after Lavabit. What follows is a real treat, a philosophical and pragmatic discussion with one of the most aware and knowledge observers in this crucial debate. From Gigaom:

Phil Zimmermann might be a technologist, but he tends to get philosophical when it comes to the issues of privacy and security and how they intersect with our society. A cryptographer, in 1991, he created Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), an email encryption software and published it for free on the internet. Since then he has become an eloquent proponent for the need for privacy and tools. Zimmermann has had his run-ins with the authorities in the past, but he is widely respected for his views on cryptography and privacy — one of the reasons why he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame and has been a recipient of multiple awards recognizing his achievements.

The spotlight fell on Zimmermann again this week when Silent Circle, a secure-private communications company he co-founded, decided to suspend its Silent Mail service amid fears of future government interference. That action followed on the heels of a decision by another secure and private email service provider, Lavabit, to shut down operations.

Om Malik: We suddenly find ourselves in a very confusing landscape, grappling with the enormity and speed of changes. I was wondering if you could try and make sense of this post-Snowden world and what it means for the long term.

Phil Zimmermann: The surveillance landscape is far worse than it has ever been and I feel like everything we do is now observable. All of our transactions and communications are all fused together into total information awareness apparatus. I don’t think any of this can be fixed merely by the application of cryptography. It is going to require some push back in the policy space. We are going to have to have Congress react to this and we need to get the population to react, perhaps through the economic consequences we face of losing a lot of business for American internet companies. Maybe American internet companies can push back because of economic harm that comes with the rest of world turning its back on us.

If China was to intercept our phone calls, I wouldn’t like that but I wouldn’t worry that Chinese authorities would bang on my door and haul me to prison because I don’t live in China. So when a government turns its powerful surveillance tools on its people, it has impact on the political opposition within the country. The power of incumbency becomes greater and opportunities for the democratic process become less and are undermined.

We can do better than that. We have to do better than that. If you look at the breaches of civil liberties in past wars, like the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, as horrible and egregious as it was, at the end of the war, we could say we had wronged and never to do it again and try and get back to normal life. It was because that war had an end. The way this war has unfolded since 9/11, it never seems to end or has an end. And each step of undermining civil liberties becomes the baseline, the new normal. The question is how far we are going to go, if there is no end to this war.

Zimmermann: We need to take an objective look at the damage since 9/11 and that would take into account self-inflicted wounds. The harm we have done to our society has come as a reaction to 9/11. The cost includes our expectations of our legal system and our civil liberties. I don’t think it is a partisan issue. We need to push back against this tide of surveillance. In my case, I create technology, so I do things that allow me to apply my skills and part of that is to develop technology tools that push back against a small subset of that problem.

Om: Did you think we would end up where we are today? Sometimes, it seems all like science-fiction stuff, and I am amazed by it all.

Zimmermann: I think it is science-fiction to have a Department of Homeland Security — just the name itself. (Laughs.) I wrote about these things over twenty years ago and when I first wrote PGP and technology extrapolations leading us to a future where the governments can listen to all our communications, can search through all our communications and do pattern recognition and study our traffic patterns. But I didn’t think it would get this bad.

Om: What about ambient data that will come from sensors in our phones and cars that will soon become judge and jury for our car insurance rates? I think we are a very nebulous state of what I like to call a data-influenced society and a lot of that is much more worrisome than NSA. What are you thoughts?

Zimmermann: I agree it is not just a matter of surveillance. Big data intentionally creates a concentration of data and has a corrupting influence. It really concentrates the power in the hands of whoever holds that data — governments, companies. The PC revolution of the late 1970s and 1980s and the later early Internet (of the 1990s) seemed to hold so much promise and empowered the individual. Now with big data there is a shift of power in the other direction as it concentrates power in fewer hands.

Of course, one can get cynical about all this but one has to fight that urge. A lot of people are getting more cynical because we are living in a surveillance state.Cynicism is the fertile soil where corruption can grow. Cynicism has a paralyzing effect and I think we need to resist that temptation of cynicism and hold on to our ideals in order to bring about change and push back.

My favorite part of this interview is his advice about what to do. I agree with Phil wholeheartedly that becoming cynical or fearful will do us no good. We need to push back agains this tide in every possible way. Not merely through new technology, but also through awareness and pressure on the corporations, intelligence contractors and government bureaucracies that profit and benefit from “big data.”

Full interview here.

In Liberty,
Mike

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