In recent years there has been an enormous spike in the apparent number of PGP users associated with newsrooms. PGP in the newsroomįor some reason, reporters have been getting very interested in secure communications. Today, an open source implementation, GNU Privacy Guard, is the frontrunner used by technologists, the human rights community, and increasingly, journalists.

Perhaps most importantly for journalists, PGP helps users encrypt messages and files. Just as your personal signature is difficult to imitate, PGP lets users create cryptographic signatures for files and messages, allowing other users to check their authenticity. Fearing that Congress would legislate away this right, Zimmermann says he worked to release his software online before such a law could pass.Īt a time when strong encryption wasn’t available to the general public, PGP became one of the most powerful ways to secure messages and files. Senate debated an anti-crime bill poised to outlaw civilian access to strong encryption. For him, PGP was a way to allow grassroots political organizations to work without worry of government eavesdropping in the U.S. PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy, an encryption standard created by Phil Zimmermann in the early 1990s.

To understand why, let’s talk about PGP, and why it’s often at odds with journalistic work. I also learned that this is a great way to annoy, frustrate, or otherwise upset journalists. If I wanted to meet technologically savvy reporters, I learned that I could more reliably catch their interest by sending a PGP-encrypted email. I was launching into my graduate research on the security habits of investigative reporters, and I wanted to hear from journalists with a variety of backgrounds. A few years ago I began sending hundreds of emails to strangers - many, encrypted.

Encrypted messengers