This Machine Kills Secrets

by Andy Greenberg

  As we sit in silence punctuated by the sound of noodle slurps, I peruse his shelves. One wall is covered in awards from civic organizations and privacy groups, the other with books on nuclear history, novels by Isaac Asimov and Neal Stephenson, and below them a mass of cryptography textbooks.

  It’s only when I mention one in particular, titled PGP Source Code and Internals, that Zimmermann immediately sets aside his lunch and switches into war-story-telling mode. “As soon as they decided to prosecute me,” he says in a mischievous tone, “that book would have been Exhibit A in my defense.”

  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. So now that I have Zimmermann’s attention, I ask him to start at the beginning. And he begins with a different war story, the one about Dr. Daniel Ellsberg.

  One dusty 1987 morning in the middle of the Nevada desert, as Zimmermann remembers it, Ellsberg, Zimmermann, and a crowd of 430 protesters filed two-by-two through the gates of Nevada’s most-active nuclear test site, where waiting guards calmly fitted them with riot handcuffs, led them off to a nearby bus, and trucked them forty miles to the tiny nearby town of Beatty to be detained by local police in a community center and then released.

  Ellsberg wore a suit, the better to illustrate with his arrest that even men who wear suits aren’t above the law. Zimmermann abided by a similar principle. “I wanted to show that we weren’t just a bunch of hippies protesting,” he says in his slow Midwestern cadence. “The message was that we were respectable Americans just like anybody else, only willing to go to jail to stop the nuclear tests.”

  For Zimmermann, the Nevada protest was the culmination of a decade of following Ellsberg’s activist lead. Growing up in the era of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, Zimmermann had been alarmed by the United States’ insistence on maintaining the world’s largest, most advanced stockpile of first-strike nuclear warheads. He’d been moved by Robert Scheer’s essay With Enough Shovels, on the government’s callous attitude toward nuclear war. (Scheer quoted a high-level Pentagon official as saying that with enough shovels, every family in America could simply build their own nuclear bomb shelter by digging backyard trenches and covering them with the detached doors of their homes.) Thinking of their newborn son, Zimmermann and his wife made plans to escape the doomed United States for New Zealand, one of the world’s most strongly antinuclear nations.

  Still in the process of applying for immigration papers, Zimmermann and his wife had attended a Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign conference in Denver. The highlight of the event was a speech by Daniel Ellsberg himself. Ellsberg described the millions-strong protest in the Vietnam Moratorium of 1969. At the time, the press had reported that Nixon ignored the marches and watched a football game. In fact, Ellsberg told the Colorado crowd, Nixon had been wringing his hands in the White House situation room, looking at crowd estimates and aerial photography. Though they didn’t know it at the time, Vietnam’s grassroots activists had convinced President Nixon not to use nuclear weapons in the war.

  The conference’s message of hope, and particularly Ellsberg’s speech, swept away Zimmermann’s pessimism. When he and his wife returned to Boulder, they had made up their mind: They would stay in the United States and fight. “It was like I had been in an airplane that I knew was crashing, trying to get in the back seats to increase my chance of survival,” he says. “Instead, I decided to get into the cockpit.”

  Zimmermann began inhaling books on atomic history, spending forty hours a week at his job as a computer engineer and another forty educating himself on the nuclear age. Within a few months, he was teaching a class in military history at the Free University in Boulder and speaking out publicly against the Reagan administration’s policies.

  In 1985, Gorbachev came to power and declared a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. Now, Zimmermann and his peacenik cohorts hoped, America’s aggressive regimen of vaporizing cubic miles of dirt and rock with hydrogen bombs under the Nevada desert could finally end.

  But the nuclear tests continued unabated. Under pressure from his generals, Gorbachev warned in 1986 that if the United States exploded just one more nuclear weapon, the USSR would be forced to begin testing again too. And it was that one, crucial nuclear warhead, deep under the Nevada sands, that brought Zimmermann, Ellsberg, and more than four hundred others to Las Vegas, where they piled into buses bound for the desert.

  The Pentagon had bumped up its schedule and already exploded its underground bomb the day before. Over the next years, Gorbachev, not Reagan, would end the world’s nuclear standoff with the dissolution of the USSR.

  But the protest had a different significance: Zimmermann’s first experience with civil disobedience locked in his resolve to grapple with unjust authority. And although he didn’t know it then, the unassuming geek was entering a new conflict where he, not his activist hero Ellsberg, would take center stage. As the Cold War was winding down, the Crypto Wars were about to begin.

  Ten-year-old Tim May sat in his bedroom with the lights turned off. He held a jar-shaped device called a spinthariscope that came with his Gilbert chemistry set, essentially a can with a small piece of radioactive radium at one end, a lens at the other, and in the middle, a thin, whitish screen of zinc sulfide. Zinc sulfide is a scintillator: When alpha particles hit its surface, it gives off light. So May allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness of his room, and then watched tiny radioactive asteroids flare into stars as they collided with the luminescent material at thirty-three million miles an hour.

  Science’s ability to generate everyday miracles was a given in May’s young life. His earliest memories are of his childhood in the early 1950s, growing up in a suburb of San Diego. Thirty miles north was the Mount Palomar Observatory, with its world’s-largest telescope, and another short drive west led to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Jules Verne’s books fueled his scientist’s imagination. Once, he remembers looking out of the window at his family’s ranch-style house and seeing a bizarre, smooth wing roar by, a plane without a fuselage. He later learned it was a Northrop prototype for the air force’s stealth bomber. One of his neighbors, across his backyard fence, was an aerospace engineer who had worked on some of the first intercontinental ballistic missiles, and when the Soviets launched Sputnik, May remembers looking up with the old man in his backyard one night and watching Sputnik orbit overhead, an artifact of human power in the sky.

  Despite his glimpses of the wonders of science, May’s upbringing wasn’t all innocence and whimsy. Though May’s father was a naval officer, he had first been an enlisted man in the South Pacific and drove a bulldozer in World War II. And May’s father didn’t spare him the grisly tales of war, how he had been ordered to use the machine to push sand over pillbox bunkers full of Japanese soldiers, burying them alive.

  After May’s father was transferred and the family resettled in Washington, D.C., it was also May’s father who encouraged his twelve-year-old son to join the local gun club. They would shoot .22 rifles together, and May learned to feel comfortable carrying and soon owning weapons. (Later in life he would slowly accumulate more of them: a .22 revolver, a .357 Magnum, an AR-15 assault rifle, a Ruger, a pair of Sig Sauers, and many others that he declines to name.)

  Just a few years after that first move, May’s father was transferred again, shipping out on the day of Kennedy’s assassination to the town of Villefranche-sur-Mer on the French Riviera. It was a fantastical setting, with Jacques Cousteau’s ship, the Calypso, often anchored in the harbor, and looming above the town the hill that Nietzsche climbed while writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

  A newcomer in a foreign country, May had few friends. As he would throughout his life, he replaced much of his social interaction with reading: physics, computers, chemistry, and science fiction, from Asimov to Bradbury. In the seventh grade he put together a hundred-page report on the design of atomic weapons in World War II, complete with explanations of the workings of nucle
ar fission, diagrams of how Fat Man and Little Boy’s chain reactions were triggered, and the effects on their targets, including graphic pictures of Japanese burn victims from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “It was clear to me then,” he says, “I wanted to work in nuclear physics.”

  When May’s family returned to Washington, D.C., he was years ahead of his classmates in his autodidact’s understanding of science. He won every high school science fair, with projects demonstrating the radio frequency emissions of ionized gases in magnetic fields and quantum tunneling. And in the summer of 1968 he discovered Ayn Rand.

  May read Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as just another science fiction novel. But this one was about politics, not technology or science. The thousand-page manifesto spoke to him about the hypocrisy of altruism and the exclusive virtue of selfishness. It explained in stark terms why anyone who seeks to oppose the profit motive and take from the rich to give to the poor is a “moocher” or a “looter” and a temporary hurdle to human progress. And most resonant with the young physics wunderkind, Rand imagined a fantasy world, what the book calls “Galt’s Gulch,” a hidden place in the mountains where the extraordinary and hypercompetent can escape the neediness and regulatory clutches of the masses—a Shangri-La devoted to science, progress, and human greatness.

  In the novel’s climactic monologue, the heroic John Galt explains to the world that its best thinkers and doers have disappeared to his elite haven. “Do not attempt to find us. We do not choose to be found,” he says. “Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t. Do not beg us to return. We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.”

  By the time May reached college, he had already stopped reading Rand, and says he would look back on her books as flawed and smug. But her ideas stuck with him. In the 1972 presidential campaign, May’s first as a legal voter, he wrote in John Hospers, the first Libertarian to make it onto some states’ ballots. He would continue to vote Libertarian for the next forty years. Today he still throws hints of her ideas, interpreted in their harshest tones, into his speech and writing: He speaks of the “clueless 95 percent,” “the dirt people clamoring for more handouts,” or predictions that “in the next decades, we’re going to see a massive burn-off of useless eaters.”

  “My political philosophy is keep your hands off my stuff,” he says. “Out of my files, out of my office, off what I eat, drink, and smoke. If people want to overdose, c’est la vie. Schadenfreude.”

  May was accepted to MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley, but chose to attend the University of California at Santa Barbara after the provost of its honors school explained that he could take graduate level classes as an undergrad. He arrived just as the late sixties revolution was in full swing. Anti-Vietnam War protesters burned down the Bank of America in the neighboring college town of Isla Vista. But May largely went about his work, graduated, and took a job beside his fellow physics geniuses at Intel.

  May’s time at Intel was less a career than a few years’ detour from his ideological wanderings. After his alpha particle victory and disillusionment with the world of business, he would retire and retreat from Silicon Valley, over the hills to his own personal Galt’s Gulch, a two-story house a mile from the beach in Aptos, California, with only his cat, Nietzsche.

  In his new life of aimless intellectual exploration, May would walk down to the beach every day with a stack of business, science, and technology magazines, academic papers, and science fiction novels, and greedily consume them until the sun set. “I never had any interest in horseback riding, boating, hiking, or whatever it is people do,” he says. “Instead, I just read and read and read.”

  The young ex-physicist became a technical and nontechnical intellectual omnivore, consuming science fiction and philosophy with equal literary gluttony. He read John Brunner’s science fiction novel The Shockwave Rider, about a world where identity is digitally defined and one rebel group allows anyone to anonymously spill their secrets over the phone lines. He read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, with its pseudonymous characters, Demosthenes and Locke, who are actually genius elementary school–age children influencing global politics on the Internet with their untraceable ideas. He read James Bamford’s The Puzzle Palace, a history of the National Security Agency and its shadowy work, and Vernor Vinge’s True Names, a novella about a cyberspace where hackers are elevated to gods and their only weakness is the identity that ties them to their frail bodies.

  Soon May discovered the Usenet, the Internet’s nascent bulletin board system. He would wait until night to switch on his 1200 baud modem and log on, the better to save money on bandwidth and avoid the traffic jams that plagued the early information networks. “It was slow, and poor and primitive, but it opened up a new world,” he said. “I let my magazine subscriptions lapse.”

  In 1987, May’s fellow techno-libertarian Phil Salin came to him with an idea Salin had been turning over in his mind for years: a market for selling information. He would call it AMIX, the American Information Exchange. Long before eBay, Salin imagined an ethereal version of that auction system, where users could pay for answers to their queries or offer up packets of knowledge to the highest bidder. In later years, big-name technologists like Mitch Kapor and Esther Dyson would advise Salin on the project.

  But May says he immediately pointed out a fundamental flaw in his friend’s vision. AMIX, he told Salin, would inevitably become a black market for stolen knowledge. “Someone asks if anyone knows how to solve the charge buildup problem during ion implant of n-type wafers,” May posits. “How long before a guy who works for a chip firm offers to sell his company’s tens of millions of dollars in research for a hundred thousand dollars?”

  Salin countered that companies and government agencies would prevent their employees from accessing the market and selling out their secrets. But May had an intuitive sense that there was no way that such protections could stop the leaking of expensive information. Motivated individuals would find some way—any way—to anonymously access the site and spill the guts of the companies or government agencies that employed them.

  Then, as the idea rolled around the darker edges of May’s imagination, he began to reconsider. Perhaps this concept of an information market could be quite interesting after all.

  Phil Zimmermann was born in 1954, in Camden, New Jersey, to alcoholic parents. His mother was a homemaker, and his father drove a cement truck. Their drinking meant that the family often struggled to pay rent, and Zimmermann remembers frequently moving out of houses in the middle of the night, many times leaving most of his childhood possessions behind them. The Zimmermanns were homeless often enough that their father began to refer to the family car as “the Buick Hotel.” Before Zimmermann was eighteen, he says, he had attended twenty-five different schools.

  As a rootless kid, Zimmermann took refuge in a secret world of codes. When he was in the fourth grade, then living in Miami, he watched a Saturday morning show called M. T. Graves and the Dungeon. Every week it would pose a secret message and tell the audience that for just two dollars, they, too, could buy a decoder and unscramble the cipher. But Zimmermann, who rarely had two dollars of allowance money to squander on such hobbies, cracked the code without the decoder. It turned out to be a simple substitution scheme: 1 for A, 2 for B, and so on. Intrigued by how easily he had outsmarted the show and obtained its two-buck secrets, Zimmermann graduated to more complex codes: Before the age of ten he had learned Morse code, semaphore, and Braille.

  It was around that time that the budding cryptanalyst discovered one of the most influential books of his young life, Herbert Zim’s Codes & Secret Writing. Zim’s code book went deep enough into the hidden arts of cryptography to captivate Zimmermann for months with simple cryptanalysis—the science of decrypting codes without knowing the key—fashioning his own encryption systems from
scratch, and cloak-and-dagger craft like writing invisible messages with lemon juice or vinegar. (The acid breaks down the paper’s cellulose to sugar where the juice has been applied, so that it caramelizes and turns brown when heated with a lightbulb.) Using what he learned from Zim, Zimmermann would challenge a friend to create an encoded message, asking him to make the message as long as possible to make it “harder.” Then Zimmermann would use a simple frequency analysis to crack the cipher, counting the proportions of every letter in the encoded text and matching them up with the statistical frequency of letters in the English language to produce a solution in minutes.

  Zimmermann’s cryptographic dreams always took a backseat to his greater ambition of becoming an astronomer. But when he left high school, Zimmermann faced a tough reality: He was several IQ points short of being a math savant. At Florida Atlantic University—hardly MIT—Zimmermann could never put his foot on the same intuitive grounding in multivariable calculus that he had found in the pleasant logic of codes. He found it, instead, in computer science classes. One of the first programs that Zimmermann wrote outside of class in his nascent coding career was a stab at implementing the simple cryptographic codes he’d loved since childhood. His first project: a digital version of one-time pads—one of cryptography’s simplest encryption schemes, and one that’s theoretically unbreakable.

  One-time pads are a deceptively straightforward tool: Assume Alice wants to send Bob a message (Alice and Bob being the two stand-ins in every cryptographer’s explanation of a theoretical scheme) and both have a copy of a pad with random numbers, one through twenty-six. That list is the one-time pad, so called because it’s meant to be used for one message and then destroyed. Alice converts every letter in her message using the same A equals 1, B equals 2 substitution scheme that M. T. Graves and the Dungeon taught Zimmermann in elementary school. But then Alice goes down the list of numbers on her one-time pad, adding each number from the pad in order to every number from her substitutions and subtracting twenty-six from any number above twenty-six. She sends the resulting gibberish—what cryptographers call “ciphertext”—to Bob. No one who intercepts those numbers can make any sense of them. But Bob uses his copy of the one-time pad to subtract the same series of random digits, adds twenty-six to any negative numbers, reverses the substitution scheme, and, voilà, reads the message in its original form, what crypto types call “plaintext.”