From: Chip Mefford <cmefford@avwashington.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 04:52:21 +0800
To: anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com
Subject: Re: Real or Not ?
In-Reply-To: <199608281157.EAA04520@jobe.shell.portal.com>
Message-ID: <v03007800ae4a3360faa4@[207.79.65.35]>
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.


I suppose this part could be true.
>
> 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.

Phil Zimmerman has been shown to be a person of remarkable personal
integrity and
since he was up on and beat charges of illegally exporting munitions, I
some how find a
lame threat of a frame up for narcotic trafficking as making him cave to
the "shadowy" government
wishes a bit hard to swallow.


>
> snip<
> 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).

Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot that the all powerful TC was behind it all, so of
course its true.

>
> 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.

Somehow, I just don't see the FSF collaborating and caveing to threats.
Also please note that
all of this code under discussion has been and is constantly being reviewed
by some of these here fine folks
and thus far, ain't no one found this often rumored secret back door, but
then again, I am quite sure the TC is behind the coverup.

have a day
in fact,
they're cheap, have 2

chipper