🚀 go-pugleaf

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Attached is the table of contents and the Foreword by Phil Zimmermann
for my book on PGP. It arrived in the publisher's warehouse last Thursday,
and should be in bookstores in a few days. It will take longer for the 
book to be available overseas; the fastest and probably cheapest way to
get it is from a US bookstore or distributor such as NCSA 
(75300.2557@compuserve.com).


                Protect Your Privacy: A Guide for PGP Users

                            William Stallings

            (Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-185596-4, $19.95, 300 pages)

                            Table of Contents

Foreword by Phil Zimmermann
Acknowledgments
Reader's Guide to the PGP User's Guide
Chapter 1    Protect Your Privacy!

                         Part I    HOW PGP WORKS

Chapter 2    Basic Principles of PGP
Chapter 3    Sending and Receiving PGP Messages
Chapter 4    PGP Features
Chapter 5    Key Generation and Secret Key Management
Chapter 6    Public Key Management

                        Part II    USING PGP

Chapter 7    DOS PGP: Getting Started
Chapter 8    DOS PGP Reference
Chapter 9    Macintosh PGP: Getting Started
Chapter 10   Macintosh PGP Reference
Chapter 11   Windows PGP
                 PART III  Supplemental Information

Chapter 12   The Building Blocks of PGP
Chapter 13   Choosing Your Passphrase
Chapter 14   Where to Get PGP
Chapter 15   Public Key Servers

<<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>>

Foreword by Philip Zimmermann

This book is about Pretty Good Privacy, a program I created to 
encrypt e-mail using public key cryptography. PGP was 
electronically published as free software in 1991. Little did I 
realize what this project would lead to. PGP has become the 
worldwide de facto standard for e-mail encryption.
	I've admired Bill Stallings's writings in computer science for 
some years before PGP, and here he is writing a book about my 
program. How can I talk about how great his book is, without, by 
implication, talking about how great PGP is? It's hard to write a 
foreword for his book about PGP without sliding into some 
measure of self-indulgence.
	I've been so close to this project for so long that I sometimes 
lose sight of the scope of what PGP provides. I got the manuscript 
for Bill's book in the mail the other day -- the book you are 
holding. Sitting down with it, flipping through it, endless pages of 
diagrams, the formal treatment of it, services provided by PGP. It 
wasn't till I saw his book on PGP that I could step back and see 
PGP as others see it. The breadth of it. As a software engineer, 
I'm used to either documenting my own software, or having a 
random company tech writer document it. All software 
engineers get that. But having William Stallings do the manual 
for your software -- it's sort of like having your portrait done by 
a world-class artist.
	There are a very small number of software packages that 
have far-reaching political implications. Most software that fits in 
such an influential category has negative effects on our civil 
liberties. For example, government intelligence agencies use a 
software package called PROMIS, which is a powerful tool of 
governments to track people's activities, movements, spending, 
political affiliations, et cetera. Now that is a piece of software with 
far-reaching political implications. Mostly bad ones. Then there is 
the software that the Medical Information Bureau uses to classify 
people who file medical insurance claims, to put them on a 
medical "black list", so that they cannot purchase any medical 
insurance ever again. That software has far-reaching political 
implications -- enough to raise a large-scale backlash in our 
society to do something about it. In most cases, it seems that 
software that has powerful political effects is software designed to 
strengthen the strong and weaken the weak.
	But PGP also has far-reaching political implications. Mostly 
good ones. In the Information Age, cryptography affects the 
power relationship between government and its people. The 
Government knows this all too well, as evidenced by their recent 
policy initiatives for the Clipper chip, which would give the 
Government a back door into all our private communications -- 
an Orwellian "wiretap chip" built into all our telephones, fax 
machines and computer networks. PGP strikes a blow against 
such dark trends, and has become a crystal nucleus for the 
growth of the Crypto Revolution, a new political movement for 
privacy and civil liberties in the Information Age.  This 
government has done all they can to stop the emergence of a 
worldwide encryption standard that they don't have a back door 
into. And that same government has placed me under criminal 
investigation for unleashing this free software on the world. If 
indicted and convicted, I would face 41 to 51 months in a federal 
prison.
	Despite the pressure the Government has brought to bear 
against PGP (or perhaps because of it), PGP has become the most 
widely used software in the world for e-mail encryption, used by 
a variety of activists, and anyone else needing protection from 
the powerful. It's also used by ordinary people to protect their 
personal and business communications from prying eyes.
	PGP may have a future as an official Internet standard, as 
the Internet Engineering Task Force develops an interest in it. No 
one who wants to work in the area of Internet e-mail privacy 
should neglect studying PGP. Because of the "fax machine effect", 
more people who want to encrypt their e-mail are getting PGP 
because everyone else who encrypts their e-mail is already 
using it.
	Naturally, I want people to read the Official PGP User's 
Guide, which comes with the electronic distribution package of 
PGP (also in book form from MIT Press), because I wrote it. Also, 
I'm more entertaining and personable in my book. And more 
political. But Bill Stallings' book is more comprehensive than 
mine, more thorough, covering more detail, with a lot more 
diagrams. He's really good at completely nailing it down in a book. 
In fact, I'll probably use his book myself as my preferred 
reference to PGP.

-- 
| Bill Stallings       | PGP key available at    | also from Stable
| Comp-Comm Consulting | gopher.shore.net        | Large Email Database
| P. O. Box 2405       | in members/ws           | contact
| Brewster, MA 02631   |                         | key@Four11.com

--
thanks,               | "The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century
                      | will not occur because of technology  but because 
David Smith           | of an expanding concept of what it means to be human."
bladex@bga.com        |               -- John Naisbitt / Patricia Aburdene