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Geeks who have an empty row on your bookshelf can get themselves their own piece of cryto-war relics on Ebay this week.
In the Nineties, when the crypto-war raged between the U.S. government and freedom-loving programmers, the government classified cryptographic software as military equipment that could not be sold without a license. Thus when Phil Zimmermann released the email encryption software PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) on the internet in 1991, the government began a criminal investigation.
After the government closed the investigation and Zimmermann started PGP as a company, his fellow crafty cypher-punks realized that the export restrictions applied only to software. So in 1997, they published all of PGP 5.0's code in a book. Actually 12 books, spanning some 6000 pages. Then the book was legally exported to Europe, where more than 70 people used not-so-amazing optical character recognition software to turn the dead-tree code back into working code.
And thus, the PGPi project created PGP that was legal to use outside the U.S. borders, and subsequent PGP releases were translated the same way until crypto-export restrictions were substantially relaxed in 1999.
Now, you can have your copy of the original book, which is at auction on Ebay. As for OCR-ing the book once you buy it, that's a step a too far, even for nostalgia's sake.
