Secure email a "daunting challenge"

I remember the early days of PGP. The program was clunky. It was never made available as a library that could be linked in to other software. Phil Z was torn between desire to commercialize it vs. desire to see it in widespread use, resulting in some frustrating decisions about license terms. Even today, those problems persist. The most widely used PGP version is GnuPG, and it’s still not available as a library and still isn’t BSD license. (The author of that program simply can’t understand that software accesses components as linked libraries through dlopen, not as standalone executables.)
The NSA got very very lucky that Phil Zimmerman was “leading” things, and then got very very lucky with the release of GnuPG.
There are alternatives coming: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chiralsoftware.mailforsure

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