[...] This set off a whole train of thought on message concealibility, like hiding messages in, say, the order of headers in a posting, or the "Reply-To:" header, or even the words in subsequent postings to a newsgroup. Who would ever think to look at, say, the third word in every posting Tim makes to alt.whatever newsgroup? Or in the "Date:" field, or in the "Message-ID:" field, or ... or ... or ...
Not much bandwidth in that medium there... Things like gif/jpeg images and sound files have a ton of semi-random bits in them that you can fool around with without anyone noticing much, but plain text in news headers and postings just doesn;t leave one with much room for putting in a message. At least not without being blanently obvious... jim