It’s a tremen­dous hon­or to be here in and to be with such a high cal­iber of fel­low inductees. It’s a tremen­dous hon­or. PGP start­ed out as a human rights project. At the time, there was no way for ordi­nary peo­ple, as opposed to gov­ern­ments or suf­fi­cient­ly resourced institutions—there was no way for ordi­nary peo­ple to com­mu­ni­cate secure­ly over long dis­tances with­out the risk of inter­cep­tion. And so PGP was to change that. And its first pur­pose was for human rights groups around the world and domes­tic grass­roots polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions in the US. Although dur­ing the crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion I had to only talk about the pur­pose being for grass­roots polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions with­in the United States and not real­ly admit that it was real­ly for human rights orga­ni­za­tions around the world. But the statute of lim­i­ta­tions have expired, so I can say that now.

The orig­i­nal threat mod­el for PGP thus was major gov­ern­ments. Other encryp­tion soft­ware that exist­ed at the time was designed pri­mar­i­ly to pro­tect busi­ness­es from their busi­ness rivals. And their busi­ness rivals had no sig­nif­i­cant crypt­an­a­lyt­ic capa­bil­i­ties. But for PGP, the pre­sumed oppo­nent was the major gov­ern­ments. And it was sort of at the end of the Cold War that PGP was designed. And so as the Cold War end­ed and glob­al­iza­tion took over in the busi­ness world, as busi­ness­es began to expand into this sort of glob­al econ­o­my and oper­ate in coun­tries with cheap labor mar­kets and bad human rights records and a his­to­ry of wire­tap­ping, the threat mod­el for busi­ness­es began to more close­ly resem­ble the orig­i­nal threat mod­el that PGP was designed for.

And so PGP kind of evolved into a busi­ness tool. And even­tu­al­ly it evolved so much into a busi­ness tool that it kind of lost touch with its orig­i­nal pur­pose of indi­vid­ual encryp­tion. And today it’s now in the hands of its fifth own­er, who I think that they now call it Symantec Encryption. I’m not even sure they call it PGP any­more. So it’s kind of… It’s had twenty-one years. 

But you know, anoth­er thing that I have been work­ing on this past sev­en years or so is secure tele­pho­ny, VOIP encryp­tion. And in fact I real­ly want­ed to do that ear­li­er than email encryp­tion, but the infra­struc­ture was­n’t there for it. So now it is, and so that’s what I’ve been spend­ing the last few years doing. And now I spend all my time on secure VOIP, and I’m hop­ing to do oth­er oth­er pro­to­cols that are designed for indi­vid­ual pri­va­cy. Anyway, thank you so much for this hon­or and, that’s it. Thank you.