On not using PGP:
1) It wouldn't have solved the problem, since the majority of people who spreead the false press release are not encryption users.
Yes, it would solve the problem. Not every individual could have verified the message, but enough people would have, and immediately enough, that no question would have remained for long about the forgery. The epistempology of authorship is of social nature already. With cryptography, one can lift authorship of public keys to authorship of documents, but this is an optimization, not a necessity. By allowing those people who do use cryptography to verify authorship, one can speed the process for the rest. Not everyone currently uses crypto, true, but better a partial benefit than none at all. And the partial benefit of a signed message is most of the benefit.
2) PGP is inconvenient to use.
3) EFF is a Mac shop, but our licensed copy of Viacrypt doesn't run on the Mac.
MacRIPEM is both easy to use and runs on a Mac. There may be other reasons not to use PEM and PEM-derived systems over PGP, but I do not think they outweigh, at this time, the public and forthright use of cryptography by the policy leaders, and I mean not only EFF here. It is not my place to make internal EFF policy, but I will suggest it, namely, that all public communications that go out to Usenet and to public mailing lists be digitally signed by their authors. Eric