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gram he was writing, initially called Caveo, and later renamed Encryption for the Masses, or E4M. Le Roux's software allowed users to encrypt their entire hard drives—and to conceal the exis- tence of encrypted files, so that prying eyes wouldn't even know they were there. This, he maintained, would be a leap forward in security, since existing encryption methods often inadvertently revealed their presence on a computer, thereby directing authori- ties to the files that needed to be broken. Worse, they might even expose information about those files—"metadata" such as their name and size—without the code having to be broken at all. Le Roux saw a way to solve both problems, and he released his crea- tion to the world in 1999, after two years of development, with a post to the alt.security.scramdisk board. The software had been written "from scratch," he said, and "thousands of hours went into its development and testing." In the spirit of the burgeoning open-source software movement, he released E4M for free, mak- ing the code available for anyone to improve.

On the website E4M.net, Le Roux included a manifesto of sorts, outlining why he believed software like Encryption for the Masses was essential in the digital age. The Internet was exploding amid the dot-com boom, but he noted that little thought was being given to the consequences of digitizing our lives. "If you are worried that someone might have access to your documents, emails, sales pro- jections, contracts, tax returns or receipts, romantic letters, or any other private files, then this product is for you," he wrote.

Privacy is becoming harder to find in the world. Today everyone, everywhere is monitored all the time, by everything from the close circuit recording system at the local store, to digital imag- ing systems at banks, the subway, and street corners. Govern- ments issue social security numbers, national insurance numbers, medicare numbers, ID numbers, passport numbers, tax num- bers, and so on. Some governments even go as far as fingerprint- ing citizens, as part of the numbering regime. Combine the two and governments have access to large pools of information