David Roberts of Leicester seems to have implied that my "Mark Thomas Comedy Product" email of earlier this week was not relevant to the list. As no-one has formerly asked the question, I shall ask and answer it myself. Martin - Why are you posting this drivel to this serious academic and research networking forum? Although the JANET community does not generally consist of profit- making organisations, many Universities and Colleges in the community do collaborate with commerce and industry, often in the European as well as the transatlantic regions. Since the end of the Cold War, Menwith Hill's functions have allegedly been moving into commercial spying as part of the UKUSA agreement in the extended national interests of the two countries. Clearly this is in itself of serious concern, however... The likely appearence of the government's Electronic Commerce Bill draft bill by Easter of this year, possibly and probably containing wide-reaching proposals for outlawing strong-crypto, increasing law enforcement agencies powers of interception of communications without a warrant from the Home Secretary, and mandatory crypto key-escrow with so called Trusted Third Parties. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and Sun Microsystems have both made formal representations to Stephen Byers, the new secretary of state for Trade and Industry following Peter Mandelson's departure earlier in the year, opposing the key-escrow element of the expected draft bill, and possibly the strong-crypto element(s) as well. As I have said before, any freedom of speech is hard won, particularly academic freedom of speech. Without getting too party political here, the present government does appear to have rather worrying control as well as media manipulation for propaganda tendencies, and I do not wish to see this bill go through without proper debate, in view of the many Members of Parliament struggling to understand the issues involved. I understand that there is a rather good web site recommending the "adoption" of your MP to help them understand these issues if they do not already. It can be found at http://www.stand.org.uk/ I hope the above goes some way towards explaining the context for my earlier email. Martin Cooper Speaking for myself...