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For exactly this reason, I don't think that this is a very good idea. The discussion here started as a search for a way to make encrypted data not look like encrypted data. (Once it becomes illegal).

I tell you three times, I tell you three times, I tell you three times... The Feds are *not* going to outlaw encryption. They believe in encryption. They even have official bodies designed to encourage encryption. They are not even going to outlaw encryption they can't break. They are internally split on the issue. By the time they got around to actually *doing* anything, we will have been online with a fully encrypted communications system for years. They can't move fast enough. They lack the overall control of the networks to implement such a proposal. There would be First Amendment challenges. In order for such regulation to be enacted, there would have to be a collective appreciation of the risk that encryption poses to the world's States (it risks their destruction but we won't tell them that). This is too much of a high order abstraction for a collective decision making process to handle. We've had powerful encryption techniques for a while in any case. One-time pads are more than 100 years old, aren't they. "Publication" in the international realm is not subject to local laws in any case. International publications routinely carry ads for goods or services that would be illegal to sell in the individual countries reached. Sometimes a country like Singapore will censor a publication like the Asian Wall Street Journal. Ridiculous since it can be read online. Outlawing encryption is a form of censorship and censorship will prove increasingly difficult as time goes on. If they can't keep crack cocaine out of Sing Sing, how can they keep PGP out of my computer (or computers under my control somewhere in the world). The enforcement problems are staggering. What about sentencing. What is the social damage involved in my sending my wife a 2.5K encrypted file. Pretty petty offense. Even if encryption was generally outlawed, anyone involved a privileged communication (spouses, attorney-client, physician-patient, priest-penitent, etc.) could continue to use the technology since assuring privacy is one of the technical requirements of exercising such a privilege. Say, what if I as an attorney operate an anonymous remailer. <G> I know that privilege probably wouldn't attach because I wasn't a party to the communications but it would make for some entertaining litigation. No one has yet answered my legal question of several months ago. If you have an unbroken coded message, how does the prosecutor prove beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty that it is a coded message. Even if it has identifying headers and footers, that say "PGP 2.2" you can claim that you just put them on to random noise for fun in order to tweak the noses of the authorities. Duncan Frissell