The "cypherpunks" liberate PGP Yves Eudes ENCRYPTION. At the occasion of Hacking in Progress 97, the large congress of information pirates which has been taking place in Almere (Netherlands), a group of militant hackers has imported the latest version of the PGP encryption software to europe, evading the restrictive measures of the American goverment. PHILIP Zimmermann, author of the celebrated encryption software Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) has once more defied the American authorities who have been preventing him from exporting his program for years for reasons of national security (see "Monde Télévision-Radio-Multimédia", 17-18 March 1996). Since 11 August, the new version (5.0) of PGP is freely available in Europe, thanks to the ruse of a team of Euro-American "cypherpunks" (1), militants devoted to the defense of the secrecy of the mails on the Internet. A few weeks ago, the US goverment authorised a limited distribution of PGP to the foreign brances of American companies (Le Monde of 4-7-97): a theoretical desision, since the different versions of PGP are already circulating in the whole world, more or less legally. Be that as it may, the militant cypherpunks do not care about these half measures for commercial purposes, coming after years of legal harrassment. To once more show the futility of the restrictions, they have decided to distribute PGP in Europe, this time legally, thanks to a legal trick. In fact, even if the exportation in electronic form (Internet or CD-ROM) remains subject to control, a federal judge has recently decided that software source code, when printed in a book, may be freely circulated, including outside the United States. Thus, the militants' trick consisted of printing the source code of PGP 5.0 in the United States, which took up twelve gross volumes, and then proceeding to Europe, carrying the books in their suitcases. There, eighty volunteers in several teams mainly based in Norway and the Netherlands, have skimmed through all of it, then scanned it page by page before finally re-creating an electronic version of the source code and then reconstructing the software. This exhausting work was achieved on Monday 11 August at four in the morning by a small group of militants piled up in a camping tent in the wood of Alemre, near Amsterdam, where HIP 97 (Hacking in Progress), the largest congress of information pirates ever organized in Europe, had been taking place for three days in open air. In spite of the late hour, the news of the installation of PGP on a European server (suitated in Norway) was saluted by an ovation that made the wood tremble, a deluge of music, bonfires, and carrying on the libations that had begun late in the evening. Then the news was distributed on the Internet by some one thousand computers at HIP 97 placed in the grass. The new PGP is equipped with a graphical interface very easy to use even by bedinners. Versions for Windows 95 and MacIntosh, integrable to the most current electronic mail software, will soon be brought to circulation. Philip Zimmermann also takes the credit for creating a general dictionary, open to all, of the "global community of PGP users".