Tim Lee at Techdirt raises a question about the purpose of increased encryption of BitTorrent traffic link here, teeing off from a Brit story in the Register link here. He suggests that it is not designed to make it difficult to determine who is using BitTorrent that can't be done. But it would make it impossible to determine whether the material transferred is copyrighted. Given the prospect of filters being used to screen web traffic, it seems to me that encryption does exactly what a lot of users would want- make it impossible for the proposed filters to identify BitTorrents of copyrighted material because the filter won't work if it can't "read" the material. That in turn may increase the pressure to ban BitTorrents completely (already tried a bit by Comcast), but that will be much harder to pull off. An alternative already in use at some colleges and universities, pushed by the industry, would be to charge students higher web access fees and pay the proceeds to the music and video industry.

Obviously someone sending and receiving large amounts of encrypted data is suspect.

I believe that we should therefore encrypt all our traffic.