********* http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1617,00.html The Netly News Network (http://netlynews.com/) December 8, 1997 A Pretty Good Story by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com) Phil Zimmermann had it easy fighting the U.S. government: At least everyone else was on his side. Today the legendary cryptographer and founder of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is finding that his latest adversaries are just as determined but much more diverse. Earlier this fall PGP drew fire for releasing PGP 5.5 with a so-called "message recovery" feature that a corporation could require users to turn on to let the boss read their e-mail. Then, when McAfee Associates announced last week it would buy PGP, formerly supportive privacy advocates screamed that the company's new owners were part of the "Key Recovery Alliance," a group of firms devoted to producing data-scrambling software easily snoopable by the government. Now the complaining may stop, at least for a while. The McAfee-PGP combo, called Network Associates, has dropped out of the alliance. "I never would have allowed my own company to join the Key Recovery Alliance," Zimmermann told me yesterday. "As soon as I found out about McAfee being a member, I tried to do something about it." [...]