PGP creator: telcos must stop cooperating with governments; special forces use Silent Circle
Father of PGP encryption: Telcos need to get out of bed with governments — Zimmermann's Silent Circle working with Dutch telco to deliver encrypted calls. — LAS VEGAS—Phil Zimmermann …
Context & Ripple Effects
Phil Zimmermann has spent the year building a commercial answer to the surveillance problem he flagged in a 2013 Q&A on e-mail privacy: in January his company partnered with Geeksphone on the pro-privacy Blackphone handset, raised $30M by May on demand for that phone, and in July launched global encrypted calling positioned against Skype and Viber.
Speaking in Las Vegas this week, he added a political layer: telcos should stop cooperating with governments on surveillance, and Silent Circle's new partnership with a Dutch telco shows carriers can sell encryption instead. The story travelled widely the same day — The Register, VentureBeat, and security researchers including Christopher Soghoian picked it up.
First-order effects
- Carriers now face a public argument from a respected cryptographer that their government-surveillance cooperation is a liability, while one Dutch telco demonstrates the alternative of bundling encrypted calls as a paid service.
- Skype and Viber gain a direct competitor whose entire pitch — global encrypted calling plans launched last month — is the privacy they do not offer.
Second-order effects
- Other telcos are pushed toward a fork: follow the Dutch partner's model and market encryption themselves, or defend existing cooperation arrangements against customers who now have an off-network option.
- The privacy-handset ecosystem around Silent Circle — Blackphone and Geeksphone — gets a carrier-distribution angle, extending the phone's appeal beyond early adopters to enterprise buyers worried about intercepted calls.
Third-order effects
- If carrier-bundled encryption spreads, telcos drift toward being regulated pipes while trust migrates to software vendors like Silent Circle — a structural inversion of the operator-customer relationship.
- Governments losing routine telecom cooperation can be expected to press harder for lawful-access mandates on the encryption providers themselves, setting up the next round of the backdoor fight.
The trend: Consumer communications are splitting into surveilled carrier networks and independently trusted encrypted services, with telcos forced to choose which side of the split they sit on.