Here's how I understand it: The U.S. Government, concerned only with making America a safer place for us taxpayers to live in, wants to regulate domestic encryption in order to have access to the content of all transmissions. Their theory is that any cryptosystem that is stronger than their cryptanalysis systems can be used in illegal transmissions and should be considered munitions. Theoretically, the government should only be have the resources to control commercially-available, public encryption systems. Who is to stop anyone from designing their own cryptosystem for personal use? If the government intercepted a transmission from this private cryptosystem, and could not decrypt it, would they assume that it must be considered munitions? Similarly, anyone could send uniformly-formatted random garble that could also be considered munitions, or at least waste the governments processing time. Why are we so worried about government regulation? Can't we just devise our own cryptosystems and just don't sell them or make them publicly available? vagab0nd@sd.cybernex.net http://ww2.sd.cybernex.net/~vagab0nd/index.html Visit web page for public key.