I’m going to tell you how a programmer almost ended up in federal prison. The same kind of prison where they put drug traffickers and arms dealers. And I’m going to tell you why that story has everything to do with something I’m building right now. But that comes at the end. First, listen.
Sending an encrypted email was legally the same as exporting a missile. The same. An email. A missile. Same legal category. That’s how insane the world was.
Only governments could use strong encryption. You, me, your mother, your neighbor… we all sent emails in the open. Anyone with the right skills could read them. Your boss. Your ex. A bored bureaucrat on a Tuesday afternoon. Anyone.
And the Senate was cooking up a bill to force backdoors into every communication system. Every single one. So the government could read whatever it wanted whenever it wanted.
Phil Zimmermann was a programmer. A regular guy. No company. No investors. No legal team. And he saw what was coming.
So he did something the government considered a criminal act: he wrote a program that encrypted emails and uploaded it to the internet. Free. For everyone.
It was called Pretty Good Privacy. PGP. Within weeks it was on servers across half the planet. Activists used it. Journalists used it. Regular people used it so their emails would be their own.
And then the FBI knocked on his door.
Three years of criminal investigation. Arms trafficking. That’s what his file said. Because a program that encrypted emails was classified exactly the same as a missile.
One man alone. No money. No lawyers. Against the entire federal government of the United States.
His crime? Believing that your conversations belong to you.
He said two things during those years that should be tattooed on the forehead of every Silicon Valley CEO.
The first: “If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.”
The second will send a chill down your spine: “Show me someone who has nothing to hide and I’ll show you someone who is either extremely boring or a complete exhibitionist.”
Twenty-five years before Snowden. With less filter and more bite.
In 1996 they dropped the charges. But PGP was still illegal to export. And here comes the move that changed everything.
Zimmermann printed the entire source code in a book. Paper. Ink. Binding. An actual book. Why? Because books are protected by freedom of speech. You can’t ban the export of a book.
Someone bought it. Took it outside the United States. Scanned it. Compiled it. And distributed it as free software.
Military-grade encryption. Distributed as a paperback. Perfectly legal. Checkmate.
Zimmermann won. Strong encryption is legal today. AES-256, military-grade, fits in your phone. The technology exists and it’s more powerful than ever.
But most apps you use every day hold the keys to your encryption themselves. Which is exactly like putting a lock on your door and taping the key to the mailbox.
Zimmermann didn’t give the world anything new. He gave back something that had always belonged to it.
He almost went to federal prison so you could have secrets. The question is: are you protecting them or handing them over to the first app that asks for permission?
In Latin, there is a single-word command meaning keep silent: sile. The silence to think in peace. To write what you feel without anyone looking over your shoulder. To hold your ideas until they’re ready. Zimmermann fought to make that silence a right. And I’m building something so you can exercise it. It’s called Sile. But I’m not going to tell you more today. Not yet. That will come.
Alejandro Cordón. alejandrocordon.com
