




Something similar has happened to me - ages ago when we were working on PGP
we used to send short messages about development issues or simply to test 
new features around.  Now at this time PGP (and certainly the newer version)
was unknown over here.  Suddenly the admin at the site I was using received
a request that I stop sending encrypted email.  Now there is almost no way
that some automatic scanner could have found this, since they wouldn't have
known about PGP - they *must* have checked for unknown data types in the
message, tried to unscramble it, found they couldn't get past the PEM
armour part, and then contacted the sysadmin and asked me to stop.  Luckily
the current email carriers are less picky about what goes over their
networks :-).

In case people think email scanning doesn't take place, I can assure you
that it is done regularly by many sites - usually not by government
agencies (or at least not that I know of), but by local administrators who,
for reasons of their own, have decided to monitor all communications
(I'm sure you can all think of a whole mess of reasons - stop hackers/
terrorists/child pornographers/drug dealers/evil commies/whatever).  There
have been several occasions when I've got people into trouble simply by
including the traditional NSA bait in a message (I don't try it any more
now :-).  A friend of mine was once picked up for mentioning the name of
the UK town of Scunthorpe (hint: look for words embedded in it).  I'm sure
there are many more examples of this happening (in fact if anyone has any
examples I'd appreciate hearing from them - I could use them as
ammunition during talks on privacy issues).

Peter.