I agree with Raph's analysis, that for something like RSA encryption to work, you need to have a strong public key infrastructure, and that the Gov't could probably build one that people would use; and that would destroy their privacy. My prediction, though, is that because Diffie-Hellmann loses its patent protection so soon, in just over a year now, that RSA, or any persistent-key system, will not tend to be used for e-mail, phone conversations, or other types of communication; for D-H, no infrastructure need be in place. Now, it's true that you can't use D-H for authentication, and that is a tremendous disadvantage. Still, you could use the established gov't PKI to do the authentication, and use D-H for the exchange of keys. thad -- Thaddeus Beier thad@hammerhead.com Visual Effects Supervisor 408) 286-3376 Hammerhead Productions http://www.got.net/~thad