With Memespeech, the encryption tech is wrapped into the transmission format, and the transmission format is Free Speech.
Even if this software were banned, a couple of points remain:
- It's unprovable that any block of Memespeech text has something encrypted in it unless you know the password
- It's easy for a developer to write their own Memespeech implementation based on the documented specification.
Not saying that anyone would violate a hypothetical (and probably unconstitutional) law, but it would be hard to enforce.
I think there are multiple senses of "banned" here. There's "made illegal" and there's "disallowed by a third-party platform." Something can be illegal but easy to do, e.g., driving without a seat belt. Something can be blocked by a platform but still quite legal, e.g., proselytizing your religion on HN.
It's pretty easy (relatively speaking) to run your own transport that doesn't go through a third party, at which point you can just use OTR or whatever. Then you're immune from banned-in-the-sense-of-blocked, and you can make your own risk decisions about banned-in-the-sense-of-illegal. (Also, depending on the details of the law, this might be perfectly legal too, e.g., "big tech must give us backdoors" doesn't need to imply "everyone who runs encryption must give us backdoors.")
It does seem like Memespeech has an advantage if you're using a third-party platform as a channel and you don't want to be blocked, i.e., you want to exchange encrypted-and-not-backdoored messages over Facebook Messenger because you can no longer trust its own encryption. I agree that this seems less likely to be blocked than literally sending base64 over the channel. But it still can get blocked - Facebook is under no obligation to transport all "Free Speech" (whatever that means) from user to user. If Facebook says, on our platform we disallow text with >20% uppercase letters, they can do that legally and constitutionally. The government could force them to do it, but they could also do it on their own (e.g. a spam detector might do it, honestly).
So you basically end up in a steganography arms race: you want to send messages that look to Facebook like actual genuine messages so they don't block you, but they contain coded information that is end-to-end encrypted using modern cryptography. I suppose it depends on a number of external factors as to whether that's easier than setting up your own transport.
For instance, if your goal is just successfully sending messages and you don't care about legality, another easy (relatively speaking) thing is to run Noise Protocol over your favorite shortwave digital mode. Then you don't have to worry about being blocked at all.
The thought experiment is:
Banning text message that are clearly readable (with or without message hidden inside, every message could hide something, even not on purpose, so everyone is 'guilty' when chatting) means you're banning freespeech (all chat message).
I don't think the method was meant to be taken too seriously, it seems to be some kind of statement.