http://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encryption-software-relies-on-one-guy-who-is-going-broke
By Julia Angwin
ProPublica
Feb. 5, 2015
Update, Feb. 5, 2015, 8:10 p.m.: After this article appeared, Werner Koch
informed us that last week he was awarded a one-time grant of $60,000 from
Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative. Werner told us he only
received permission to disclose it after our article published. Meanwhile,
since our story was posted, donations flooded Werner's website donation
page and he reached his funding goal of $137,000. In addition, Facebook
and the online payment processor Stripe each pledged to donate $50,000 a
year to Koch’s project.
The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower
Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists,
dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of
money to keep his project alive.
Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and
since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches
and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out
of money and patience with being underfunded.
"I'm too idealistic," he told me in an interview at a hacker convention in
Germany in December. "In early 2013 I was really about to give it all up
and take a straight job." But then the Snowden news broke, and "I realized
this was not the time to cancel."
[...]
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