In regard to things like Fidonet sysops noting forbidden encryption pasing through their systems: Encrypted messages could be encoded in a final pass as English sentences. A 2000 line C program with a 200,000 word dictionary could encode and decode sentences that were roughly grammatical, even if they sounded really weird on average. Although I've never heard of this being done, it's pretty obvious in one sense, so I'm sure it's no surprise to the spooks. It surely wouldn't be obvious to snoopy Fidonet sysops, though, so it may have its uses. BTW a more complex program + dictionary could confine the encoded utterances to topical words and therefore sound even less weird. With enough sophistication, such an encoding could generally pass muster as "confusing and poorly worded jargon" to anyone but the most devoted analyst. I've got enough (or almost enough) sw & dictionaries & word clusters on hand to implement such a thing, but I've personally no purpose to use it for. Doug