Düsseldorf, Germany — Tuesday, June 6, 2017. The GnuPG Project today announced the launch of a funding campaign to further support and improve its leading mail and data encryption software, GnuPG. The campaign aims to secure 15000 Euro per month in recurring donations from individual donors to finance the development of their free software. Donations can be made at the newly reworked website:

https://gnupg.org/donate/

Activists, journalists, lawyers, and many others rely on GnuPG to protect their communication. The software guards emails, files, and programs from government and criminal snooping and spying on Windows, Mac, and Linux. And, more than two-thirds of the servers running the Internet rely on GnuPG to verify the integrity of system updates.

Ongoing government spying revelations have shown how little of our information is really safe. GnuPG is one of the few tools that can offer real protection, free of commercial interests. Edward Snowden used it to encrypt his communications with journalists. Many institutions use GnuPG because by using an open standard they can be sure that they will always be able to access their data.

The 6 person development team is currently financed from a successful campaign in early 2015, regular donations from the Linux Foundation, Stripe, Facebook, and a few paid development projects. To ensure long-term stability the new campaign focuses on recurring donations and not one-time donations. Says lead developer Werner Koch: “We want to continue our work in the long term. But, we want to do so in such a way that our first loyalty is unambiguously to the general public. This means making sure that a majority of our funding comes from individual donors, and not corporations.”

To highlight GnuPG's role in protecting data, user stories from 26 organizations including activist groups, news organizations, lawyers, and companies from all over the world have been collected. Their testimonials are presented in daily changing videos on the campaign site.

Since 1997, GnuPG has allowed individuals and companies to encrypt and sign data and communication using the well-established and highly interoperable OpenPGP standard. It comes with state of the art cryptography and features a versatile key management system. GnuPG, also known as GPG or sometimes incorrectly as PGP, can be used standalone, but has all features needed for easy integration with other software. It is used as the core cryptography engine of a wealth of other applications: For example Thunderbird with Enigmail, Gpg4win, and GPGTools. Most operating systems use GnuPG's signing ability to protect system updates against malicious attempts to introduce backdoors. GnuPG is available free of charge, and comes with all source code to allow anyone to audit the software. https://gnupg.org

g10 Code GmbH is the privately owned legal entity behind the GnuPG Project. They employ all developers and keep all profits for the development of GnuPG and related free software. https://gnupg.org/imprint.html

Neal H. Walfield, Werner Koch
Email: media@gnupg.org
Phone: +49-2104-4938797 (during European business hours)
Twitter: @gnupg
OpenPGP: 370C 0FC3 1293 B339 61C1 FC20 B367 1B93 6BA8 BCB2