a friend and i had a discussion on this very subject recently. if you don't mind the social network analysis but desire privacy of content, does it matter if your encrypted comms stand out assuming they can't break the cipher?
Depends. If you're planning on knocking over the Empire State building then even if they can't crack your code (in a reasonable amount of time) they still have sender/receiver IP as well as a host of other information. Come to think of it, isn't the encryption length itself unencoded in the header? Even if not, if your message falls into a high enough risk bucket to merit an all-out assault, if your message doesn't yield then after a certain point they'll start realizing that you probably cooked your own and did it very well. In THAT case they probably start thinking about sending a blackbag operation into your neighborhood. -TD