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Osoba

Phil Zimmermann

February 12, 1954

Creator of PGP and central figure of the first Crypto Wars

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O osobě

American cryptographer and software engineer who released PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) in 1991, putting strong public-key cryptography in the hands of ordinary users for the first time. The international spread of PGP triggered a three-year U.S. federal criminal investigation for alleged munitions export, dropped without charges in 1996. Co-founder of the OpenPGP working group at the IETF and later of Silent Circle. His stand made "code as speech" a working principle of the cypherpunk movement.