I'm sorry, but it seems I have missed the original mail, i.e. the first quote here. if there is anything important in it that was not quoted, please include it somewhere in your replies. I hope I haven't missed any other mail.
Falcon, aka FitugMix, wrote about a suggestion to chop crypto or other contraband material into separate streams, e.g. bit 1 of each byte in stream 1, etc., hoping that this would be "legal" because it's not really encryption, though if managed carefully it would still be hard to read.
this concept is virtually identical to fractal encryption, where a message is chopped into its component parts (25 a's, 3 b's, 8 c's, and so on) and also chopped into a configuration scheme. this form of encryption does fall under the definition of munitions by the u.s. government...
yes, I found that out in the meantime. the legal aspect falls short of my expectations. I still consider the scheme to be both simple and useful because it actually changes the byte structure, so looking for 'a' or 'e' or similiar pattern-analysis does not work anymore. in combination with steganography, I believe this can make things really hard to find, but I'm willing to learn the opposite if someone with more cryptoanalysis know-how tells me. if I'm right, it might still be useful for people, e.g. in china working outside their local laws anyways. it probably needs extension before it's really useful, so I have put up the code on funet.fi (pub/crypto/cypherpunks/incoming). take a look and tell me what you think, please. Falcon