[robbiep]

The obscene thing is, any organisation large enough to willingly plot the downfall of western civilisation is going to have a guy, or be able to outsource the production of to a guy, who can develop an end to end encrypted communications channel on an open platform.

Unfortunately our prime minister whoshiuld know a lot better as a result of being an IT pioneer in this country, is being fucking rediculous when it comes to his current political reality, because he doesn't have any balls.

[fantispug]

If it's illegal to send encrypted communications it will still have an impact. If the source of any unapproved encrypted transmissions could be identified there is a good chance the sender could be apprehended.

[Retric]

You assume it's obvious when something is encrypted. Steganography is generally easier with encrypted messages as it looks random.

[astrobe_]

Indeed, unless the traffic/file is explicitly labeled as encrypted (protocol, file header etc.) I think there's no way to tell if a particular piece of data is encrypted or not.

More generally, the incredible stupidity in those calls for encryption bans is that the "bad guys" will abide to the law. There's a dark market for botnets etc., so why not for custom stealth encryption tools? I wouldn't be surprised if it already exists.

[fantispug]

That's a very good point; even if it's possible to detect steganography of encrypted messages it's probably expensive to do so, especially in the torrent of digital traffic online.

I guess it will only impact law abiding citizens then.