I mailed this about 5 minutes before the news of list death arrived, so it didn't make it. Conspiracy! Anyway, I posted this to comp.org.eff.talk and so far it has generated no interest. The Cypherpunks have been mentioned in various articles in the mass media as a group that would at least toy with the idea of civil disobedience concerning ITAR violation. Imagine yourselves trying to topple ITAR by publically exporting PGP to many countries, every day, for over a year. Yet do any of us really want to push our luck this way? Phil Zimmermann is out a lot of cash paying for a legal team. He can hardly afford taking his family out for dinner. That's why discovering this, I feel it should make *news*. As it turns out, the internet's largest Macintosh ftp archive has been exporting MacPGP2.2 every day for the last year! This to Singapore and China and God knows where else. Every country on Earth with an internet connection, likely. Here is a satirical essay, explaining what anyone who takes ITAR at face value might do if they discovered this situation.... -----BEGIN ROT13 SIGNED MESSAGE----- Fellow citizens of the United States of America, I wish to inform you of a great and ongoing catastrophe of most serious consequence. It is organized crime, by definition. Below is the header for the MacPGP2.2 file on sumex-aim.stanford.edu, archived with dozens of other utilities, as /info-mac/util/pgp.hqx, which has been there for *over a year*, many times a week being *exported* onto info-mac mirrors around the world. This is the most massive and organized absolute violation of the USA's ITAR munitions export laws (regulations) we have ever witnessed. For an entire year, weekly if not daily, the notorious encryptor PGP, right under our eyes, exported! I hope this is cleared up as soon as humanly possible, but we are all of us left with the guilt of not having noticed this before. All this talk of ITAR and there you are, your largest communal Mac ftp site pumping out PGP across the border like a huge demonic machine bent on destroying our beloved society. If the moderators cannot be contacted immediately, I suggest military force be used. Or cooperative shutdown of the US internet connections. Please begin this at once, as it *must* be stressed that PGP is classified as a MUNITION, right along with rocket launchers and tanks!!!!!!!! This is as serious as it gets. I didn't even know what the internet *was* back in April of '93, and I am but one in a million (literally) who has access to sumex-aim.stanford.edu and all its mirror sites. It must have been my destiny to save the world, for none of *you* seem interested in doing so. It has only been an hour since I discovered this NATIONAL SECURITY DISASTER, and I immediately set myself in action to save my country from destruction. *I*YoU*mE*We*OiwIE*wE*yOU*Me*I* P.S. Here is the evidence:
From: macmod@SUMEX-AIM.Stanford.EDU (Info-Mac Moderator) Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1993 23:22:58 PDT
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) ver 2.2 - RSA public-key encryption freeware for MSDOS, protects E-mail. Lets you communicate securely with people you've never met, with no secure channels needed for prior exchange of keys. Well featured and fast! Excellent user documentation.
PGP has sophisticated key management, an RSA/conventional hybrid encryption scheme, message digests for digital signatures, data compression before encryption, and good ergonomic design. Source code is free.
Keywords: PGP, Pretty Good Privacy, RSA, public key, encryption, privacy, authentication, signatures, email
(This file must be converted with BinHex 4.0)
:$8eKBe"(8$)Z-LjcC@%!39"36'&eFh3J!!!$@3X!!%DFIea6593K!!%!!eN,FNa ....
And upon downloading it and starting it up, the console window faithfully displays:
Pretty Good Privacy 2.2 - Public-key encryption for the masses. (c) 1990-1993 Philip Zimmermann, Phil's Pretty Good Software. 6 Mar 93 Date: 1994/06/12 16:10 GMT
I further suggest that all of the following sites (but a sample) immediately remove this file from their archives and stop mirroring sumex-aim till they too remove the file. To keep this from happening again, I suggest *all of us* in the USA delete our copies of PGP from our hard disks, lest our children export it into the hands of such enemy nations as these. It is time we put an end to this scourge, for look what will happen if we do not. Pornographers and terrorists are coming for our children if we do not act. Death to PGP users!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Where is our government in all of this? Our tax dollars are not being used to protect us from the EXPORT OF MUNITIONS TO ENEMY NATIONS!!!!! I suggest full prosecution of all users and maintainers of sumex-aim, as they have all obviously conspired to maintain this treachery. I suggest they all be searched for other weapons as well including land mines, automatic machine guns, poison gases, biological weaponry and mind control devices of all sorts, as it is my firm belief that the only reason they are interested in PGP is to forward their agenda to export other munitions, drugs pushed on *our* children to pay for them!!! This will culminate in the obvious acquisition of *nuclear bombs* by every Tom Dick and Harry gangster. Little boys and girls in the getto with *neutron bombs* and *poison gas missiles*! I shutter to think we could have stopped it but, alas, we may have failed ourselves. Here are the target sites. I suggest immediate offensive attacks to destroy these evil ports of death and destruction.... Australia (Melbourne): archie.au//micros/mac/info-mac/util/pgp.hqx Austria (Vienna): ftp.univie.ac.at//mac/info-mac/util/pgp.hqx Canada (Vancouver): ftp.ucs.ubc.ca//pub/mac/info-mac/util/pgp.hqx Finland (Espoo): ftp.funet.fi// pub/mac/info-mac/util/pgp.hqx Finland (Jyvaskyla): ftp.jyu.fi//info-mac/util/MacPGP2.2.sea Germany (Hannover): ftp.rrzn.uni-hannover.de//pub/info-mac/util/pgp.hqx Japan (Tokyo): ftp.center.osaka-u.ac.jp//info-mac/util/pgp.hqx Japan (Tokyo): ftp.iij.ad.jp//pub/info-mac/util/pgp.hqx Japan (Tokyo): ftp.u-tokyo.ac.jp//pub/info-mac/util/pgp.hqx Netherlands (Wageningen): ftp.fenk.wau.nl//pub/mac/info-mac/util/pgp.hqx Republic of Singapore (Singapore): ftp.nus.sg//pub/mac/util/pgp.hqx Sweden (Lund): ftp.lth.se//mac/info-mac/util/pgp.hqx.Z Sweden (Uppsala): ftp.sunet.se//pub/mac/info-mac/util/pgp.hqx Switzerland (Zurich): nic.switch.ch//mirror/info-mac/util/pgp.hqx Taiwan (Hsinchu): ftp.edu.tw//Macintosh/info-mac/util/pgp.hqx UK (London): src.doc.ic.ac.uk//packages/info-mac/util/pgp.hqx.gz -----END ROT13 SIGNED MESSAGE----- -----BEGIN ROT13 SIGNATURE----- Whar fvkgu avargrra uhaqerq avargl sbhe. Sbhegubhfnaqgra punenpgref va frirauhaqerqrvtuglrvtug jbeqf bs baruhaqerq yvarf. -----END ROT13 SIGNATURE-----