Polyanna's item about crypto-anonymity protecting informants and background sources is most interesting. DEspite my dislike of spying, this idea sounds pretty decent. No invasions of privacy or civil rights are necessarily involved; infiltration is somehow not quite as awful as the spectre of mass surveillance (if nothing else it's labor intensive, which limits its use to substantial cases). And it might just get a lot of results. Might also lead to a lot of whistle-blowing on white collar baddies like the S&L fraudsters. Hey, long before Michael Milliken's name was in the media, I heard about his little fraud scheme from a fellow telecom technician who worked on the PBX in his office and got a whole lot first-hand from casual chat overheard in the office. Consider all the secretaries who know their bosses are cheating, ripping off, and all that. (Consider them dead if their crooked bosses ever go through the hard discs and find fragments of cleartext or even ciphertext hanging about: we need to educate the public on crypto protocol so people don't make dumb errors that may cost them dearly!) -gg