"cypherpunks" [there is no movement] lose out to fear of crime?

Ken Brown k.brown at ccs.bbk.ac.uk
Tue Apr 17 10:05:53 PDT 2001


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]





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