Which cryptography program should I use?

Now we get to the meat of the issue. Many people will recommend many different things based on their own personal preferences. The most popular program right now is named PGP, which stands for Pretty Good Privacy. However, we cannot recommend this program for a few reasons, all of them legal. We'll go over legal issues here shortly.

The other program which we do recommend is named GPG, or GNU Privacy Guard. GPG doesn't have the same legal encumbrances that PGP does. It was written explicitly to replace PGP with cryptographic methods that are freely usable by everyone.

This table summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of these two programs:

	PGP		GPG
Advantages	Disadvantages	Advantages	Disadvantages
Easy to use under Windows	Difficult legal issues	No difficult legal issues	Difficult to use under Windows (currently)
Already in use widely	Not always free to use	Always free for everyone
E-mail messages are compatible with GPG	Multiple versions which are not completely compatible with each other	E-mail messages are compatible with PGP
		Easy to use under Linux

The legal issues surrounding PGP are of serious concern to US citizens. If you are a US citizen, please pay special attention to these issues, and consider your final choice of program very carefully. We will, once again, recommend GPG based on these legal issues.