Privacy Can’t Wait: Phil Zimmermann Was Right

In the early 1990s, a software engineer from New Jersey released a free encryption tool that the US government classified as a weapon. The tool was Pretty Good Privacy — PGP — and it would go on to become the most widely used email encryption software in the world. The engineer was Phil Zimmermann. He nearly went to prison for it. Three decades later, his warning about the fragility of digital privacy has never been more relevant.

At a plenary discussion during the Litecoin Summit 2024, Zimmermann was interviewed by journalist and privacy advocate Naomi Brockwell, laying out with striking clarity why we are once again at a critical inflection point — and why the window to act may be closing faster than most people realise. You can watch the full discussion here.

Governments Live in a Golden Age of Surveillance

Zimmermann’s central argument is simple and sobering: governments today have a level of visibility into our lives that no regime in history could have imagined. Every digital interaction — where we go, what we search, who we talk to, what we buy — is being logged somewhere. And most of it flows through private companies that governments can compel to hand it over.

He uses a striking metaphor to describe what little privacy remains: a panorama display almost entirely illuminated, with just a few dark pixels left. Those pixels are end-to-end encrypted communications — Signal messages, encrypted emails, private phone calls. And governments, he says, are furious about those dark pixels. They want total illumination.

This is not a hypothetical future scenario. It is happening right now. The UK government secretly ordered Apple to create a backdoor into its encrypted iCloud backups — and when Apple refused, the UK disabled Advanced Data Protection for all British users rather than back down. The EU’s so-called Chat Control regulation, still grinding through Brussels, proposes mandatory scanning of private messages across all platforms. France passed a law in 2025 that initially included a provision to force access to encrypted communications under anti-drug-trafficking powers. Sweden nearly banned Signal entirely. These are not isolated incidents — they are a coordinated global push against the last remaining private spaces in digital life.

The Choke Point Nobody Saw Coming

One of the sharpest observations in the discussion is about app stores. When Zimmermann released PGP in 1991, he could distribute it freely — post the source code online, print it in books, hand it out on floppy disks. There was no single point of failure that a government could pressure to stop distribution.

Today, the vast majority of software that reaches users flows through two gatekeepers: Apple’s App Store and Google Play. Both have already demonstrated a willingness to remove apps at government request. When Russia asked Apple to remove an app it objected to, Apple complied — not just for Russia, but globally.

And now Google is tightening the screws further. Starting in 2026, Google will require all apps installed on certified Android devices — including those from alternative stores and sideloaded directly — to come from verified, identity-confirmed developers. Anonymous or pseudonymous publishing will no longer be possible. F-Droid, the open-source app repository that has long served as a haven for privacy tools and uncensored software, has called the plan an “existential threat” to alternative distribution. The open Android ecosystem, long positioned as the antidote to Apple’s walled garden, is quietly being enclosed.

Zimmermann saw this coming. The choke point is the delivery mechanism, not the software itself. Control the store, and you control what people can install. Control what people can install, and you control what tools they can use to protect themselves.

Democracy Cannot Survive Omniscience

The most urgent thread running through the discussion is the connection between surveillance and democratic backsliding. Zimmermann draws a direct line between a government’s ability to monitor its population and its ability to suppress political opposition.

China is the clearest example. With an estimated billion surveillance cameras, facial recognition deployed at scale, and a social credit system that punishes dissent, organised political opposition has become functionally impossible. The result is not violent uprising — it is passive withdrawal. Young people have adopted what is called “lying flat” (躺平, tǎng píng): refusing to participate, to strive, to consume. It is a protest that the surveillance state cannot easily identify or punish, because it is defined by inaction. That is what political life looks like when privacy disappears entirely.

And China is not a distant cautionary tale. Hungary elected a leader in a free and fair election, and that leader used democratic institutions to dismantle democratic checks — seizing courts, academia, the press, and the electoral apparatus — until he became, as Zimmermann puts it, a dictator who cannot lose an election. The same pattern is repeating in country after country. Surveillance infrastructure does not cause autocracy, but it makes autocracy permanent. Once a regime has the tools to monitor every conversation, every assembly, every transaction, the ability of citizens to organise and reclaim power vanishes.

As Zimmermann puts it: we have never before lived in a world where governments have omniscience. It is not clear that democracy can survive it.

The Boiled Frog and What to Do

So why isn’t there more outrage? Zimmermann’s answer is the boiled frog: the erosion of privacy has been so gradual that the new normal simply feels normal. People who grew up with smartphones have no lived reference point for a world in which private conversations were simply… private. The Overton Window has shifted so far that mass surveillance is now treated as a reasonable trade-off for convenience.

His prescription is both technological and political. On the technology side: start using privacy tools now, before they become inaccessible. Encrypted messaging apps, VPNs, open-source software. Not because you have something to hide, but because access to these tools may not always be guaranteed, and the habit of using them is itself a form of cultural resistance. On the policy side: push back against pervasive surveillance infrastructure — facial recognition networks, data broker ecosystems, government pressure on tech platforms. Elect leaders who take civil liberties seriously. Support organisations fighting these battles in court and in parliament.

Encryption software, he stresses, is only part of the answer. The battle is ultimately about what kind of society we want to live in — and that battle is fought in policy space as much as in code.

The first Crypto Wars were fought and, largely, won by a small group of cypherpunks who believed privacy was a fundamental right worth going to prison for. The second Crypto Wars are already underway. The question is whether enough people are paying attention this time.

Phil Zimmermann is the creator of PGP, the encryption standard that sparked the original Crypto Wars of the 1990s. A lifelong human rights and civil liberties activist, he released PGP as free software to protect grassroots activists from government surveillance — and was investigated by US federal authorities for three years as a result. He is widely regarded as the godfather of digital privacy. Naomi Brockwell is a technology journalist and privacy educator dedicated to helping everyday people understand and protect their digital rights. The discussion referenced in this article took place as a plenary session at the Litecoin Summit 2024.

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