Whilst being heavily opposed to the chip although less affected by it since I dont reside on US soil, one useful purpose of it would to exploit the functions of it to send your pre-encrypted data through it and have it come out the other end in the same form, thus using it's protocols of retransmission and error correction. Using the encryption part of it isnt worth considering due to the real lack of data integrity if (as?) the TLA's have backdoors. Basically mooch it's good points and ignore the bad points as your data wont be channeled to the phone in cleartext anyway. (This isnt an advocacy of the damn thing, just a note that it has SOME functionality for those that wont use the encryption functions). Mark mark@coombs.anu.edu.au