A quick Choating: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/04/15/magazine1.html?10070 The burden of the article is a brief (& mildly inaccurate) account of James Ellis & Whit Diffie & PKC, a complaint about the rise and rise of TV (& other) monitoring of public places, and a rant about the UK's absurd TV licencing system. It uses the word "cypherpunk" more than once. "NO HIDING PLACE" "Britain is now a surveillance state. The authorities may be prying into your 'private' life this second. And in the electronic age, it is much easier for innocent people to be mistaken for criminals. Bryan Appleyard investigates..." [...] "Since both the NSA and GCHQ are founded on the principle that they should be able to read any communication anywhere in the world, this is their worst nightmare. Since 1975 they have been battling to find ways of ensuring they can still eavesdrop on anything. And, because Diffie's trick was already out there among the nerds and hackers of the world, this battle had to take place in public. Essentially, both the British and American security services wanted copies of all keys to be lodged with government agencies - so-called "key escrow" - or, as in the system we now have in Britain, they wanted to be able to demand the surrender of keys." "But the libertarian nerds, known in this field as "cypherpunks", fought back in the name of freedom from the all-seeing eyes of Big Brother government. In the United States they have had some success, thanks to the native distrust of government; in Britain they have had almost none." "After the collapse of communism in 1989, this issue became even more urgent. The primary targets of the security services were no longer the Soviets. Now they were organised criminals, drug traffickers and terrorists. This meant they wanted to watch their own citizens rather than just foreign spooks. The possibility of the high-tech, constant-surveillance Big Brother state was threatening to become a reality." [...] "Do we care? In Britain, apparently not." [...] [Perhaps odd that it turns up in the Sunday Times which hasnlt had much of a reputation (dare I use that word, having never met the journalists in the flesh?) for civil liberty campaigning for the last few years. It's a Murdoch paper, Britain's best selling "serious" newspaper, traditionally a little downmarket of it's more famous daily sister - the default weekend reading of 2-car, 2-parent mildly right-wing Tory-voting suburban families. For a couple of decades it has been leading the march of the Sunday papers away from campaigning journalism and into vast piles of supplements and sections full of beautiful photographs of sundried vegetables]