Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a computer program for the encryption and decryption of data. Created in 1991, it provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting texts, including e-mail. In Delta Green, Major General Fairfield famously used PGP to encrypt his Final Report.
Since 1997, there has been an international standard for PGP, known as OpenPGP, created to avoid licensing problems. GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is a GPL-licensed alternative to the official PGP suite, compliant with the OpenPGP standard.
Prompted by a 9 May 1998 DGML post, Ricardo J. Mendez pointed out that PGP was available internationally. The PGP home page wouldn't let you get the American version of PGP 5 at the time if you lived outside the USA or Canada, but you could get the full version from several other sites, listed in alt.security.pgp.
External links
- User's guide to PGP by Randall Munroe
Credits
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Material relevant to this article has been archived by the Fairfield Project at Electronic surveillance discussion. |