Exactly the right approach.
Thanks for posting this. Phil Zimmerman did the world a huge public service by creating PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).
From his essay Why I Wrote PGP (first published in 1991 and updated in 1999):
It's personal. It's private. And it's no one's business but yours. You may be planning a political campaign, discussing your taxes, or having a secret romance. Or you may be communicating with a political dissident in a repressive country. Whatever it is, you don't want your private electronic mail (email) or confidential documents read by anyone else. There's nothing wrong with asserting your privacy. Privacy is as apple-pie as the Constitution.
The right to privacy is spread implicitly throughout the Bill of Rights. But when the United States Constitution was framed, the Founding Fathers saw no need to explicitly spell out the right to a private conversation. That would have been silly. Two hundred years ago, all conversations were private. If someone else was within earshot, you could just go out behind the barn and have your conversation there. No one could listen in without your knowledge. The right to a private conversation was a natural right, not just in a philosophical sense, but in a law-of-physics sense, given the technology of the time....
The government has a track record that does not inspire confidence that they will never abuse our civil liberties. The FBI's COINTELPRO program targeted groups that opposed government policies. They spied on the antiwar movement and the civil rights movement. They wiretapped the phone of Martin Luther King. Nixon had his enemies list. Then there was the Watergate mess. More recently, Congress has either attempted to or succeeded in passing laws curtailing our civil liberties on the Internet. Some elements of the Clinton White House collected confidential FBI files on Republican civil servants, conceivably for political exploitation. And some overzealous prosecutors have shown a willingness to go to the ends of the Earth in pursuit of exposing sexual indiscretions of political enemies. At no time in the past century has public distrust of the government been so broadly distributed across the political spectrum, as it is today.
Throughout the 1990s, I figured that if we want to resist this unsettling trend in the government to outlaw cryptography, one measure we can apply is to use cryptography as much as we can now while it's still legal. When use of strong cryptography becomes popular, it's harder for the government to criminalize it. Therefore, using PGP is good for preserving democracy. If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy....
-- more: http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/index.html
It's well worth your time to read this entire essay.
Though he's no longer the owner of PGP, Zimmerman's work lives on:
Hushmail
Symantec Encryption Software
Open PGP
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