Long, long ago, in the forgotten mists of 1990, in the back of Omni magazine there was one of those small ads sections., in which one in particular caught my eye. I’m paraphrasing from memory now, so the wording might not be exact, but I’ve had sufficient occasion over the years to recall it, so I’m pretty sure it’s reasonably close the original:

This year, give your chauffeur what he really wants: an in-car anti laser eavesdropping device.

A small ad … no big fanfare or anything … all casual like — nothing unusual at all, simply a cheaper option than going to a big brand supplier.

In 1990 already.

In 1995 (or, possibly, early ‘96), for the (in those days, not altogether unprincely but still within the reach of mere mortals such as myself) sum of £25, I ... a civilian ... purchased a copy of Steganos 2.0.

It was one of the versions Steganos GmbH released back when they were producing interesting software (steganography suites) rather than dull, run-of-the-mill variations on TrueCrypt without the extra benefits (no hidden filesystem within the container for instance ... did I mention Steganos had become dull?)

With it, as a freebie, came the Zero Emission Pad ... a simple text editor in the style of Windows Notepad that generated a random noise profile to disrupt the phosphor pattern generated by your CRT monitor, thus preventing your screen from being read through walls, some ten-to-twenty feet away, thanks to the noise of the electrons departing it.

In the interim, of course, things have moved on and I’m not even sure I want to know what I don’t know about any more — there comes a point where all the joy is sucked out of life in a world in which you know the only way to guarantee any semblance of privacy any more is to move to a deep cave system, control the temperature and moisture levels, so that your heat/gas signature can’t be detected from outside … and never leave it, subsisting on whatever lichens and creatures-of-the-deep you can find there, licking the condensation off rocks for hydration.