In the business area, the advantages of keeping PGP legal—and avoiding Clipperish solutions—were just as clear as at the personal level. “PGP is essential,” said Robert David Steele, a former CIA agent whose passion for legalized encryption and dislike of Clipper must have endeared him to many hackers.[6.27] “Security is the foundation for openness. In order for a world of open electronic exchanges actually to succeed, electronic persons have to know three things, all of which PGP supports: (a) that the person on the other end of the link is who he says he is, (b) that the information being received is genuine and not altered, and (c) that a digital cash payment will be forthcoming, assuming that this is part of the transaction.” Steele was not just talking about the benefits of PGP for business alone, but clearly it was among the major uses that he quite properly had on his mind here. Many business people on the Net agreed. I was hardly surprised to read in the _New York Times_ about the use of PGP “in what was apparently the first retail transactions on the Internet using a readily available version of powerful data encryption software designed to guarantee privacy.” A Philadelphia man had used PGP to scramble his credit card number and spent $12.48 and shipping costs on a compact disk with rock music from a New Hampshire company called Net Market. More benefits were to come. Already other companies were working on digital cash, which could let bits and bytes go out over the Net in ways that prevented them from being easily traced. They would be, in other words, just like dollar bills.[6.28] You could spend them without Big Brother knowing that you’d bought a _Playboy_, a Rush Limbaugh book, a condom, or whatever else might somehow cause your neighbors or your boss to take offense. PGP also made sense for privacy protection _within_ companies. An accounting firm in Palo Alto, California, for example, used PGP to guard backup tapes in case of loss or theft, and a Washington accountant relied on it for client communications.[6.29] And when Zimmermann himself asked online for PGP testimonials, a man with a telecommunications firm on the West Coast told him how much he loved it as an alternative to Clipper: _Once it becomes a standard, the competitive software industry will have no incentive to continue technical development in crypto. And then once Clipper gets cracked by outsiders or otherwise compromised, there will still be a lot of bureaucratic inertia protecting it and keeping the fact that it’s been compromised a secret._