[Details on the AT&T/NSA wiretapping]

[Bill Stewart]

>>Another point that was made years ago on Cypherpunks is that the presence 
>>of crypto "where it doesn't belong" is probably a very high risk 
>>indicator. In other words, if your sender IP isn't some bank or big 
>>company and you're using crypto, they probably grab ALL of that and send 
>>it to high-cost processes.
>>
>>The moral of this story is: Use Stego in your P2P'd Porno if you want to 
>>send anything discretely.
>
>The increasing use of crypto in popular P2P (e.g., Azureus' newest 
>releases) is a godsend for privacy.

PGP might still be "crypto where it doesn't belong", but VPNs aren't -
not only do big companies use them extensively for home workers,
but small companies are much more likely to use VPNs than
to set up frame relay networks these days.

It's amazing how something that used to be a cutting-edge
technology and civil liberties issue has become a
standard tool for daily commuting for much of the workforce.

VPNs are also used for connections between companies,
but for most of my (big-company) customers,
they're primarily used for workers at home or on the road,
especially since most of the country has broadband.

Meanwhile, the _really_ popular encrypted P2P is Skype.
It's not the world's best crypto (mainly due to
poor choices of strong algorithms, e.g. RSA instead of DH),
and being closed-source you can never be too sure what's happening,
but it's Pretty Good, and extremely widespread for home users.