How to Encrypt Your Email

Some years ago, an antinuclear activist named Phil Zimmermann created a data encryption program for computers. He designed a key-generation and encryption-and-decryption system called PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, for the bulletin board systems that were the precursors to forums, email and the Web. Civil libertarians and e-commerce lapped it up back in the nineties, and this algorithmic scrambling of information has played an important part in the growth of the Internet. Encryption in general has proven to be a vital element in e-commerce.