[Eric Hughes described a situation where data smuggling is required, and asks for discussion on practicle and practicable mechanisms (with appropriate and far too rare here emphasis on practicable). This is the sort of real-worldish issue I've been on this list for, so, despite my opinion that this doesn't sound like a real case, I'd like to add my thoughts.] What is needed here is not encryption, by steg, of course. Why worry about key distribution at all? If the data is being sent in bulk, it will find itself into the hands of the local Big Bro, and the transport medium will be exposed and (presumable) confiscated. This will get the M industry into trouble, and lose the transport medium. This seems more like a case for point-to-point transport to several distribution sites withis the country, where more anonymous transport must be arranged. At the very least, no industry should be placed at risk without the means to protect itself. Maybe DAT tapes of "bootleg" recordings of music M? Like Grateful Dead tapes, only edited to contain the data. This way, only certain tapes have data, and the tapes can find their way into the hands of those who can decode and distribute. Is there, within the country, a suitable transport medium that is transient and frequent? Someone suggested weather maps (sorry I forgot someone's name) but these don't seem perfect. What about scanned in art GIFs on a ntionally available network? Hmmm....... Compuserve? The problem I have with using steg as the mass-transport (other than loss of transport medium once it is discovered and loss of a cultural industry) is that it only reaches those with CD-ROMs. This is generally a small percentage of people. Some in-country transport to the technologically uneducated is necessary. This may be out of the scope of this discussion. For the initial transport, why be cross-platform? If MS-DOS machines with CD-ROM or DAT readers are acailable (or PIC's can be brought in... hmmm... anyone know how to encode a Photo-CD? "Tourist shots... Grand Canyon, Yosemite Nat'l Prak..."), there is some program on comp.binaries.ibm.pc that can encode some .com files as readable text (Not uuencode, the text IS the .com file). A simple de-stegger could be sent in this way written on a sheet of paper. Something similar could be worked out for other platforms (maybe not this simle, though). They key problem I see is regular, bulk transport of data to be distributed to a mass of people at random containing cantraband information is unlikely to sustain an information revolution. Distribution of the data to a few people who can make use of it while remaining anonymous seems more effective. Better still would be to find some way that anyone could receive ALL the information easily and untraceably, which is what I think the CD scheme was aimed at. Unfortunately, it is risky and only gets data to the privedledged few. Sorry if this rambled, I'm doing this off the top of my head and with a fever. Seth Morris (Seth.Morris@LaUNChpad.unc.edu)