From: qut@netcom.com (Dave Harman OBC)
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 14:07:22 +0800
Subject: Re: Real or Not ?
In-Reply-To: <199608281157.EAA04520@jobe.shell.portal.com>
Message-ID: <199608290321.UAA15144@netcom.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


! I snagged this off a news group this AM.. comments??
! 
! A lot of people think that PGP encryption is unbreakable and that the
! NSA/FBI/CIA/MJ12 cannot read their mail. This is wrong, and it can be a
! deadly mistake. In Idaho, a left-wing activist by the name of Craig Steingold
! was arrested  _one day_ before he and others where to stage a protest at
! government buildings; the police had a copy of a message sent by Steingold
! to another activist, a message which had been encrypted with PGP and sent
! through E-mail.
! 
!  Since version 2.1, PGP ("Pretty Good Privacy") has been rigged to 
! allow the NSA to easily break encoded messages. Early in 1992, the author, 
! Paul Zimmerman, was arrested by Government agents. He was told that he 
! would be set up for trafficking narcotics unless he complied. The Government 
! agency's demands were simple: He was to put a virtually undetectable 
! trapdoor, designed by the NSA, into all future releases of PGP, and to
! tell no-one.
! 
!  After reading this, you may think of using an earlier version of 
! PGP. However, any version found on an FTP site or bulletin board has been 
! doctored. Only use copies acquired before 1992, and do NOT use a recent 
! compiler to compile them. Virtually ALL popular compilers have been 
! modified to insert the trapdoor (consisting of a few trivial changes) into 
! any version of PGP prior to 2.1. Members of the boards of Novell, Microsoft, 
! Borland, AT&T and other companies were persuaded into giving the order for
! the modification (each ot these companies' boards contains at least one
! Trilateral Commission member or Bilderberg Committee attendant).

The only true part in this hoax is the extent of corporate and political 
membership in international capitalist organizations like the Council of 
Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderbergers, and hundreds of 
other redundent alike organizations dedicated to making the whole world 
the same.

!  It took the agency more to modify GNU C, but eventually they did it.
! The Free Software Foundation was threatened with "an IRS investigation",
! in other words, with being forced out of business, unless they complied. The
! result is that all versions of GCC on the FTP sites and all versions above 
! 2.2.3, contain code to modify PGP and insert the trapdoor. Recompiling GCC
! with itself will not help; the code is inserted by the compiler into
! itself. Recompiling with another compiler may help, as long as the compiler
! is older than from 1992.

This identical post was included in an issue of Phrack about three or four 
years ago.  So this bogus post is already pretty old.  With all the real 
creepy stuff happening in the world, who needs to make up lies?