I had a funny thought the other day. YES, the remailers have been set up for foiling traffic analysis and YES they are reasonably secure and YES they are oriented toward private citizens striving to protect their personal privacy....BUT: Wouldn't it be funny, if the CIA (or other agency) used the remailer system (alon with PGP) for regular communication with operatives overseas. Think about it for a second...the NSA can't be the only one monitoring Internet traffic. With that in mind, say the Company had to get a message overseas to an operative. Probably it would be a bad idea to send a message to someone overseas with the return address of spooks@langley.cia.gov.us, so why wouldn't they take advantage of the remailer system? That way the message (encrypted of course) would arrive in a person's mailbox from hacktic or wimsey or kaiwan and noone could attach any sort of importance to it. And because it could be encyrpted every step of the way, noone would also be able to snoop. Yeah, they probably have their own exotic encryption systems.....cyphers that would be a dead give away in the case of an operative getting busted. But again, PGP being nicely widely distributed, no enemy agency need attach an identity to a suspect by virtue of his using PGP. Just a thought and mybe a lame one at that, but what the hell, stranger things have happened. It would be mildly cynical to imagine the reamailer system set up to throw roadblocks at the intelligence community was actually being used by that same entity.