David: I see one possible flaw in your argument here that you may wish to address. "If encryption which prevents communications from being understood by the government is used only or mostly for criminal communication, the government can use its limited resources to gain information from the frequency or origin or destination of the encrypted traffic where it is legal and technically possible to do so. But if everyone encrypts, it will be impossible for any information to be gained through such traffic analysis." Here is my problem. If the government is only going to 'read' encrypted traffic it will still be spoofing all traffic. Depending on the protocol being used, the level at which the encryption is placed, etc. this may end up meaning that they have to read your data to see if it is encrypted. Yes, if someone is using a common and low-layer protocol like L2TP? /IPsec VPN Tunnel they can strip the headers off the UDP packet and have a pretty good guess that it is an encrypted packet. It is also easy to guess if the communication is traveling on a standard port for encrypted communications. But what of other circumstances? If it is traveling on an unassigned port, if only the payload data is encrypted, if it is encrypted at a higher level, say the app layer like TLS or SSL, then the only way to really know if the data is encrypted is to reassemble the packets and try to make sense of the data. And here lies the rub. once the government is doing that, does that not automatically raise the government's conduct to the level of oppressive or abusive? Now again, perhaps the government is better at detecting the use of data encryption than are civilians. There has been some excellent work done in this area recently that may support that possibility. But I still think you may want to give that paragraph a second look. After all, with the apparent exception of some pretty high-end Bayesian analysis, one UDP or TCP packet looks a lot like another. \ No newline at end of file