Thu, Oct 2, 1997 at 6:31:50 PM by DW

Bill:

I've done a bunch more thinking and talking and listening about privacy.

A couple of top-level items...

It's way too hard to use. It's flaky. And it's not standardized. If I want to use Eudora (I do) I can't send signed or encrypted messages to people who use your emailer or Netscape's. Not good. Luckily this is not a standards morass, just a battle. It can be solved, but someone has to give, and everyone has to have a reason to compromise. Luckily, the bigger picture, freedom from interference by the US govt, is a good incentive.

The key is to get millions of people sending secure and signed messages. So you go to the people with the most users. I think of Steve Case at AOL and the guys at HotMail (I don't know them). What impact they could have here.

I hope we can work together on this. I like projects like these. They tend to create new opportunities for new kinds of software, so I like it even more. Some great software came out of the 24 Hours of Democracy project. Same should happen here. Win-win-win.

More later...

Dave