From: anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 1996 23:16:23 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Real or Not ?
Message-ID: <199608281157.EAA04520@jobe.shell.portal.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).

 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.