Tales from the ‘crypt… First
Tales from the 'crypt... First off, I should apologise for linking to the Washington Post article which falsely claimed that Phil Zimmermann regretted developing PGP - crap reportage at its pinnacle. Secondly - I keep hearing one politician after another railing against both encryption itself and those who object to its being demonised in the name of 'civil liberties'.
Let's look at this realistically: Assuming PGP or a similar encryption technology was indeed used to plan the events of September 11th, what would outlawing it or 'regulating' it have achieved? Well, in the first instance, prohibition never works, because too many people are too willing to profit from any black market they can get into, so the only people to suffer would be those of us who might want to encrypt our communications because they're private and personal, and not the people who plan terror and murder. Plus, "necessity is the mother of invention" is a proverb for a reason - because it's true - someone unscrupulous enough not to report what they'd developed would just create a new encryption technology, or lo-tech would re-arise, as it actually already has; not for nothing does the Al-Qaida organisation use messengers with physical messages to carry communications.
And 'regulation' won't catch the bad guys anyway - suppose everyone was legally required to hand over their private keys against the day that the government might decide it needed to check out their email. What conceivable reason would potential terrorists have to hand theirs over? So once again, the law-abiding would hand over their liberties, while the bad guys blithely carried on sending their encrypted instructions to kill, maim, and terrorise.
How this fairly obvious and logical reasoning isn't able to make it into the thick skulls of the politicos I can't fathom. Unless of course, they don't want to understand it, because it wouldn't give them an opportunity to curtail all of our liberties of course......
Who, me? Cynical?