High-resolution elevation data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission-Level 2 (SRTM-2), previously only available for the United States, will be made publicly available over the next 12 months
::it will be available to everyone and will be released in the next year::
It's been available via FTP for at least 7 years. Perhaps they are now releasing some version that's higher resolution than the prior 1", 65GB tile dump.
The date in the data version history is "02/14/05" for this release.
Is it available to non-US citizens too?