Subject: Zimmermann's personal response to PGP remarks on Canal+ Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 10:32:45 -0800 From: Philip Zimmermann To: Michel Bouissou Please post this on the appropriate French newsgroups. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On January 20, Canal+ TV in France aired a program about cryptography, in which they showed Mr. Frederic Braut of the Network Associates Inc (NAI) office in France, speaking about the email encryption software PGP. Mr. Braut made the astonishing statement that PGP, in compliance with French law, has a back door for the French government to decrypt messages. As the creator of PGP, I just want to set the record straight and say that nothing could be further from the truth. PGP has no back door, not for the French government, not for any government. No version of PGP ever produced by me, or by anyone I have worked with, has ever had a back door. That goes for every version of PGP ever released by me, or by MIT, or by the company that I founded, or by NAI who acquired my company, or by Stale Schumacher, who distributes the freeware version of PGP in Europe at http://www.pgpi.org. In fact, no version of PGP that I have ever heard of has ever had a back door for government access. That applies to all versions of PGP up to and including the current version, PGP 7.0.3, released in January 2001. I do not know why Mr. Braut said such a misleading statement. As far as I know, he works for another division of Network Associates unrelated to PGP, and evidently knows very little of PGP's development history, or even of the current state of French law. Perhaps Mr. Braut is unaware that the French government relaxed domestic controls on strong cryptography in 1999, which means using PGP in France no longer violates French law, despite the fact that PGP has no back doors. I hope that NAI provides Mr. Braut with a proper education on this subject. Philip Zimmermann http://web.mit.edu/prz prz@mit.edu 25 January 2001 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.0.3 iQA/AwUBOnATf2PLaR3669X8EQI+qQCgyzoj8gL9Jos10KUo88w0HYQPgKYAoIkX jbrL+tvCgpE5mjfjgeyykx9K =BumA -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ------------------------------------------------------ Philip R Zimmermann http://web.mit.edu/prz tel +1 650 347-9743 prz@acm.org fax +1 650 348-4849 -------------------------------------------------------