For three years, Phil Zimmerman lived under the constant fear of going to prison.

His crime: writing a computer program that was circulated on the Internet.

Zimmerman is the programmer from Boulder, Colo. who designed PGP -- Pretty Good Privacy -- a program that allows regular computer users like you and I to make e-mail messages unreadable to anyone other than its intended receiver.

Zimmerman's story reveals much about the government's attitude toward the sanctity of your private communications.

The technology to keep electronic communications private is called encryption, and you're likely to hear a lot about it in the news from Washington in the coming year or two.

Zimmerman wrote PGP in 1991, when an e-mail address was still a bit uncommon among common folks, but not among Very Important Persons such as university researchers and military and law enforcement personnel.

So it is no surprise that after allowing PGP to be circulated on the Internet -- which made it available overseas -- that by 1993 Zimmerman's program had caught the attention of U.S. Customs.

Under regulations still in force and developed during the Cold War Era, any encryption program stronger than a decoder ring you might find in a cereal box is classified as munitions -- military technology -- and are illegal to export. By making PGP available on the Internet, Zimmerman, the government contended, could have been prosecuted under the same laws that make it illegal to export guns and bombs to Iraq, Iran and Libya. Under minimum sentence guidelines, Zimmerman would have spent 41 months in the federal slammer. He had reason to be worried.

PGP is so far the mostly widely-used program of its kind, allowing Internet users to shield their communications from the prying eyes of hackers or government officials who might intercept the message.

In January of this year, the feds finally dropped the Zimmerman case without indicting him. During those years his story became an illustration of just how clueless the government has become to technology and how it should and should not be regulated.

Zimmerman, has since become a political activist on encryption and privacy issues. He recently told his story to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee looking at ways to change encryption rules.

You can hear him tell his story himself using Real Audio. Point your browser to www.hotwired.com/wiredside.

He described a possible society that sounded a lot like a popular novel I read in high school: 1984.

The World Wide Web has made it possible for people with the right technology - including the government -- to monitor your movements around the Internet, Zimmerman said. He likened it to having someone watch your eye movements in a bookstore, recording what books you look at, what articles in magazines interest you. The possibility also exists that someone can monitor your spending habits, keep a log of whom you exchange e-mail with, and what you say in those messages.

But his description went even further.

"Sometimes in a democracy bad people can be elected. ...If some future incumbency allows itself to monitor the opposition, that government would have tremendous power to maintain its incumbency. It could be the last government we ever elect," he said.

As digital correspondence and commerce becomes an increasingly important part of our personal and professional lives, keeping that communication as private as the whispering in a friend's ear is going to be a big challenge. And of course there are many differing opinions on how that challenge should be met.

So far, the government has tried its best to maintain control of encryption technology. But its ideas have left quite a bit to be desired.

Check back next week, and I'll fill you in on The Clipper Chip, as well as its offspring: Clipper II and Clipper III.

Arik Hesseldahl covers business and technology for The Idaho State Journal.