It's a gradual change, certainly. The Washinton Post hasn't mentied crypto in their exhaustive covering of the subject. But I maintain it's not that far beneath the radar. Watch the Lehrer Newhour (or whatever the hell it's called now) tonight, for instance. -Declan On Tue, 14 Jan 1997, Sean Roach wrote:

...

Don't be too sure that crypto is that far beneath the radar. I spent Thursday through Saturday at an annual privacy conference for activists from around the country, and they understood the principles. Their voicemails were filling up with calls from reporters last Friday about the Gingrich incident, and I know they were talking crypto. ... Believe me, at least around here it is. I am a college student studying computer science, and 80% of the people that I talk to on a regular basis not only know how to play around with windows, (and Netscape), but also at least a modicum of simple fixes to simple

At 08:37 PM 1/13/97 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote: problems, (such as unformatting a DOS disk). This is what I consider to be bottom level for that 80%, however, very few of them know even as much about cryptography as I do. And I barely know how to use PGP. I have had Computer Science professors express ignorance as to what PGP is, much less all of these others that I have learned about by hanging around here. A few people know what crypto is, but most don't.