As of August 10, 2002, all official WHOA correspondence is PGP-signed by the sender. We've found it necessary to begin doing so due to some problems with forgery and false claims that our personnel have made outrageous statements. We realize that many people are not familiar with PGP, so we decided to provide a brief explanation here. There are many excellent documents available that explain PGP and its history in great detail, so we won't repeat that material here.
Why Use PGP?
PGP can be used, as we are using it, to digitally sign messages. The signature can then by checked to see that the message truly came from the purported sender, and to see if the message has been altered in any way since it was signed. For instance, one stalker repeatedly forged messages from his victim to various newsgroups, especially ones that she frequented. She began using PGP, so that it would be more obvious to anyone who knew her that any message without a PGP signature was a forgery. That worked quite well. The stalker got annoyed and tried copying the PGP signature from one of her legitimate messages to one of his forgeries in an attempt to make the forgery look more legitimate - but several regulars in the newsgroup used PGP to find that the message did not have a valid signature. He finally stopped forging newsgroup messages in the woman's name, since he couldn't fool anyone any more.
PGP can also be used to encrypt information, so that only the sender and the intended recipient can access that information. If, for instance, you were sending very sensitive information to someone and had concerns about someone else intercepting that mail, you could encrypt it. The message is then utterly useless to anyone but you and the proper recipient. We've repeatedly had people coming to us who were certain that somehow their stalkers were reading their email messages. If those messages were PGP-encrypted, that wouldn't be a concern.
Getting Started
We've created step-by-step tutorial for Windows users who wish to install, configure and begin using PGP. We would like to provide the same information for Macintosh users. Unfortunately, at this time our webmaster does not have access to a Macintosh so that she can create that tutorial.
Where to Obtain PGP
- The International PGP Home Page
- Network Associates sells versions of PGP for business use.
- GNU Privacy Guard is a completely free and unrestricted replacement for PGP. It is also compatible with PGP.
Informative Sites
- PGP User Guides
- Cryptography - excellent general article about cryptography which mentions PGP.
- How PGP Really Works - this is an extremely technical document
- CryptoRights.org is a team of volunteers who have published some very helpful information and stand ready to help PGP users with questions and problems.
- Tom McCune's PGP Questions and Answers
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