99. The Philip Zimmermann Defense Fund. Call for donations
Description
This article is from the PGP FAQ, by Jeff Licquia jalicqui@prairienet.org with numerous contributions by others.
99. The Philip Zimmermann Defense Fund. Call for donations
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- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
This is a call for donations to support Philip Zimmermann, the
author of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), directed especially to the
european users.
To avoid the large bank fees when transferring money to the
United States or when issuing checks to overseas, I have established
an european legal trust fund for your convenience. First of all, I'd
like to inform you what this legal trust fund is all about in the
first place. If you already know Phil's situation, you might skip the
quoted message below. I am using parts of the "request for donations"
as it was posted by Philip Dubois, Zimmermann's lawyer.
| As you may already know, on September 14 LEMCOM Systems (ViaCrypt)
| in Phoenix, Arizona was served with a subpoena issued by the US
| District Court of Northern California to testify before a grand
| jury and produce documents related to "ViaCrypt, PGP, Philip
| Zimmermann, and anyone or any entity acting on behalf of Philip
| Zimmermann for the time period June 1, 1991 to the present."
|
| Phil Zimmermann has been explicitly told that he is the primary
| target of the investigation being mounted from the San Jose office
| of U.S. Customs. It is not known if there are other targets.
| Whether or not an indictment is returned in this case, the legal
| bills will be astronomical.
|
| If this case comes to trial, it will be one of the most important
| cases in recent times dealing with cryptography, effective
| communications privacy, and the free flow of information and ideas
| in cyberspace in the post-Cold War political order. The stakes are
| high, both for those of us who support the idea of effective
| personal communications privacy and for Phil, who risks jail for
| his selfless and successful effort to bring to birth "cryptography
| for the masses," a.k.a. PGP. Export controls are being used as a
| means to curtail domestic access to effective cryptographic tools:
| Customs is taking the position that posting cryptographic code to
| the Internet is equivalent to exporting it. Phil has assumed the
| burden and risk of being the first to develop truly effective tools
| with which we all might secure our communications against prying
| eyes, in a political environment increasingly hostile to such an
| idea -- an environment in which Clipper chips and Digital Telephony
| bills are our own government's answer to our concerns. Now is the
| time for us all to step forward and help shoulder that burden with
| him.
|
| Phil is assembling a legal defense team to prepare for the
| possibility of a trial, and he needs your help. This will be an
| expensive affair, and the meter is already ticking. I call on all
| of us, both here in the U.S. and abroad, to help defend Phil and
| perhaps establish a groundbreaking legal precedent. A legal trust
| fund has been established with Phil's attorney in Boulder.
If you wish to donate some money to Philip Zimmermann, you may
now transfer it to an account here in Germany -- what is usually quite
a lot cheaper than transferring it to overseas. Here is the
information you will need:
Account owner: Peter Simons
Bank : Commerzbank Bonn, Germany
Account No. : 1112713/00
Bank No. : 380 400 07
This is NOT my private account! It is only used to collect the
donations for Philip. Every single dollar I receive will be
transferred to the account in the States monthly, with minimum fees.
If you donate any money, you might want to send an e-mail to me
(simons@peti.rhein.de) and to Philip Dubois (dubois@csn.org) to let us
know. Sending a copy to Phil's lawyer will furthermore make sure that
I can by no means keep anything for myself as he knows exactly what
amount has been given.
If you need any further information, please don't hesitate to
contact me under simons@peti.rhein.de and I will happily try to help.
You may get my PGP public key from any keyserver or by fingering
simons@comma.rhein.de.
Please be generous! Consider that PGP is completely free for you
to use and Phil got nothing but trouble in return. One can easily
imagine what a software company had charged you for a tool like that!
Sincerely,
Peter Simons <simons@peti.rhein.de>
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