Is a computer program still a program when it's in printed book form? Or is a program a "munition" which cannot be exported without US government approval?
These questions arise with the latest update (Version 5) of the encryption program Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). When earlier versions of PGP were distributed worldwide on the Internet the US government began a three-year investigation of the program's author, Phil Zimmermann. Possibly facing jail for illegally exporting "munitions", Zimmermann spent thousands of dollars defending himself before the case was dropped last year.
"The technology to invade your privacy keeps improving, so the technology to protect your privacy should improve as well," said Zimmermann, announcing the new Version 5 last month.
New features include a graphical interface for Windows and the Macintosh, plus integration with popular e-mail programs. All very well for those who can legally download the free software from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (www.mit.edu/network/ pgp.html). This page is intended only for the US and will try to block downloads from other countries.
The MIT version has already appeared on a server in the Netherlands - illegally exported from the US, presumably. However a Norwegian privacy activist is taking a more laborious approach to keep within the law. Stale Schumacher, who maintains an international PGP home page (www.ifi.uio.no/ pgp/), says the new version should be available in Europe at the end of this month and "everything about this is perfectly legal".
Phil Zimmermann has released the source code for each version of PGP - the original programming language instructions used to generate the "executable" program that runs on a computer - to let others check it for weaknesses.
Schumacher and other activists bought the printed version of the source code, published as a book in the US in mid-June before the program itself was released. The 12 volumes, containing 6,000 pages of source code, were brought to Norway to be scanned back into electronic form using optical character recognition. Its legality hinges on the fact that the export of books of source code is not banned. "Phil Zimmermann and PGP, Inc. have no part in this," Schumacher states on his page, explaining the huge scanning project. "We are a handful of activists who would like to see PGP spread to the whole world."
(fomarcaigh@irish-times.ie)