******* Here's a photo: http://www.mccullagh.org/image/6/phil-zimmermann.html ******* http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,41896,00.html PGP Creator Bolts to Hush by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com) 8:25 a.m. Feb. 20, 2001 PST Phil Zimmermann, the legendary creator of e-mail and file-encryption program PGP, will become the chief cryptographer for Web-based e-mail company Hush Communications. Citing differences with Network Associates -- which bought PGP in 1997 -- Zimmermann said he left the company so he could devote his time to making the open standard called OpenPGP more accepted in the industry. "For the past decade PGP has been the gold standard for e-mail encryption but we've always had trouble expanding beyond the power users because of ease-of-use problems," Zimmermann said in a statement on Monday. "The OpenPGP standard will be well served by Hush's fresh approach to ease of use and its roaming capability." Hush Communications, based in Dublin, Ireland, is a venture-capital funded company best known for its free, encrypted Hushmail and HushPOP services. Zimmermann's departure from Network Associates caps a turbulent decade marked by the release of his first version of "Pretty Good Privacy" in 1991, his instant fame as a hero of the online privacy movement, a tussle with patent-holder RSA Data Security, and an agonizingly extended criminal investigation by the federal government for alleged violations of U.S. export laws governing cryptographic products. When the antiwar-activist-turned-programmer sold his company, PGP Inc., to Network Associates and became a senior fellow, he began to have clashes with executives over the direction of PGP. Network Associates repeatedly flirted with the concept of key recovery -- endorsed by the Clinton administration but anathema to privacy advocates -- and has refused to publish the source code to the latest versions of PGP so outside experts can verify that no backdoors are present. Network Associates' departure from the aggressive kind of full disclosure favored by security analysts has fueled a move in the open-source community toward GNU Privacy Guard, a free replacement for PGP that does not rely on the patented IDEA algorithm. But its graphical interface, GNU Privacy Assistant, still is being developed and is not a finished product. [...]