Spoken like one of the millions that has not cracked under torture throughout history. No, the reason it doesn't work so well is that they don't know if you're just making shit up to avoid being tortured more. And even if you do tell they're likely to torture you some more because they'll assume you're still holding something back, so even if you get some truth it's maybe half-truth or mixed up with lies. If they had a safe and they knew for sure you have the combination and could instantly verify if you told them the truth or not, I bet torture would be 95%+ effective. What they want to achieve during torture is simply to pass the limit of how much pain you can take, whether you're almost passing out or delirious doesn't matter much as long as you don't die on them. Then they give you a break and say talk or we'll do that again.

There are a few people that can withstand torture but it's not because of amnesia, it's because they know that if they talk their friends will die or go to prison. I've never read a war documentary where the person claimed to have cracked and wanted to talk but mind blanked and simply was unable to, they've all either talked or been of the "the pain was out of this world but I'd never tell them anything, they'd have to kill me first" variety. Or for that matter, kill themselves first if they get the opportunity either before or after getting caught. I've read some stories from WWII that makes waterboarding sound very tame, under real not-pretending-to-be-civilized torture you are going to wish you were dead.

Well, in theory, yes, but it's not very practical. Not only do you and your recepient have to agree on a code, it can also be pretty suspicious if the person trying to eavesdrop on you knows a fair lot about you (e.g. that you'd probably not usually do a birth announcement in a newspaper because you're living alone).

If that's what you plan to do, in this day and age it's probably less suspicious if you start a Facebook page, recruit a few thousand "friends" via some FB game that rewards you for having a lot of friends and post things that sound like they're part of your dull, boring life while actually being the code for your target audience.

As if people care about that. If they did, the average EBay scam could not be pulled off, and yet it's still going strong, after years and years of the same trick being pulled on the same people.

The DOD called, they claim they have a patent on that shit.

Depends entirely on the games you play. In the average FPS you're right. In pretty much any other multiplayer game, being the first to load can be a decisive advantage.

Steganography is neither limited to data at rest nor to pictures. As long as you can transmit data that need not have a certain format to be considered "normal", you can transmit data hidden inside other data. If everything fails, transmit a lolcat pic that contains the data you want to transmit as a mail attachment.

What's harder to hide is source and destination of your traffic, though with a bit of creativity and the use of international providers even that's not completely out of the question.

Use international politics to your benefit. If you want to evade the government of country A, find out what countries would rather not aid them and try to use resources in those countries.

Who'd have thought you'd ever be happy about a deadlocked legislative, hmm?

You know, I know, possibly he knows, but it seems to still work on the dimwits keeping him in office.

You mean, like, say, end to end encryption?

What a novel idea, you should patent it...

Here's the third: Take your business elsewhere.

The world is a large place. Someone might want to tell Mr. Bigwig that his laws mean jack in all but one country.

When drawing blood and getting covered in fecal matter is involved, I think it's not to be thought of as just "an alternative".

But that's me.

Yep. It was George Soros who planted the fake Obama birth notices in Hawaiian newspapers.

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