Phil Zimmermann

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.