I would have trusted Donna, but I still had mixed feelings about most teenagers using PGP without their parents’ sharing the keys. How long until Senator Exon ranted that the young would encrypt dirty bytes? In the end, however, just as with children’s use of the Net itself, PGP should be a family decision, not a federal one; Washington mustn’t turn into a giant version of Donna’s mother. Risks from a ban, even one limited to children, so outweighed the benefits. If Donna’s mother wanted to understand her daughter, then maybe she needed to spend less time doing a domestic-level KGB act and more time at a computer—seeing for herself what her daughter was up to. In the process she might understand Donna well enough to tolerate her opinions. She’d better learn to brook them; her daughter was almost eighteen, the age of adulthood in the United States. Soon many parents would be more comfortable with the technology, and then, family by family, parents could decide whether to be Big Mama or Big Daddy and look for PGP-encrypted files. It should be a family, not a government, matter. If nothing else, parents themselves could use PGP to guard their own privacy. “I use PGP at home solely for keeping confidential information from prying eyes—for instance, from my son and my son’s friends, as well as for keeping their information in one central place,” said Joe Collins, an employee of an international investment bank based in New York. It guarded his burglar alarm codes, the codes to the family safe, all credit card numbers, and all passwords to software on the family computer. Yes, some popular software came with encryption, and certain people might have argued that home users such as Collins didn’t need PGP. But the encryption found in popular software was nowhere near in PGP’s league. In fact, Crak Software, a company in Phoenix, Arizona, even sold “password-recovery software” to crack popular programs such as WordPerfect, Word, Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, and Quattro Pro (for backup purposes). AIDS activists especially understood the possibilities of good, strong encryption; victims of the disease, after all, were treated about as fairly as lepers had been in biblical times. In New York a group called ACT UP tried to get the public health officials to encourage labs to use PGP to protect the identities of patients. The officials liked the idea. The program died at the hands of a parsimonious governor; but sooner or later, I suspected, PGP would be used in one way or another to protect the privacy of AIDS patients, if it wasn’t already.