> You could always encrypt the payload, but all you're doing is giving your adversary another (trivial) hoop to jump through when you could've just encrypted th

> You could always encrypt the payload, but all you're doing is giving your adversary another (trivial) hoop to jump through when you could've just encrypted the message to begin with. Wouldn't "an encrypted message that no one is sure you sent in the first place" sometimes be more useful than "an encrypted message that any eavesdropper knows you sent" in oppressive-surveillance-state scenarios? (It seems that, if you find some subset of bits in a JPEG/PNG that normally have random distribution and don't affect the image that much, putting an encrypted message into those bits might be indistinguishable from a "completely normal" image even to a well-informed attacker.)