Word: cypherpunk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
However, public-key encryption created a headache for the NSA by giving ordinary citizens -- and savvy criminals -- a way to exchange coded messages that could not be easily cracked. That headache became a nightmare in 1991, when a cypherpunk programmer named Phil Zimmermann combined public-key encryption with some conventional algorithms in a piece of software he called PGP -- pretty good privacy -- and proceeded to give it away, free of charge, on the Internet...
| 1 |