I think that what we really need is some kind of NNTP-like system that distributes encrypted packets instead of cleartext ones. If you want to baffle traffic analysis, just create a system where they can't tell the difference between your emails and tons and tons of news traffic. It's not like you could really escape regulation here; if people can't read it, it isn't news. But you could provide a bunch of encrypted traffic on the same port as any encrypted- mail distribution or encrypted-web system (a la freedom) during the news distribution - and you could read news without any news hosts anywhere knowing which news you were reading. Hell, you could even gateway some usenet groups through it if you wanted to give it a kick-start. And you could have your own groups available only on the crypto grapevine. They would serve as message mixes, in some cases. You wouldn't want to follow the classic hierarchical distribution model that usenet uses; that makes any differently-routed traffic stand out. But NNTP is actually pretty flexible about how messages get passed, and could be deployed in a fractal way as easily as a hierarchical way, at the cost of distribution being a bit slower. With straight NNTP, the overhead of organizational messages would be raised; but it could be made more efficient again using hashes on multiple messages so that different hosts could quickly check for identical lists of posts and quickly discover any that were missing in either direction. Bear