[teflodollar]

You make a good point, but finally encryption is just a tool. The virtual and the physical spaces are both domains, whose different nature offers different tools at their disposal. I don't think you can protect anything in the physical domain with the same certainty and mathematical elegance that's available to digital files, but if there were I wouldn't be opposed to it.

Imagine if there were a safe that couldn't be opened by anyone but the owner without destroying its contents. Would you be opposed to that? What if the design mechanism of this safe were as easy to implement as the encryption protocols are? Yes, one day some expert safe-cracker might break it. And in the even farther future the advent of "quantum safecracking" would perhaps make the safe as secure as a luggage lock. In the meantime the police would have to resort to their traditional methods.

Unfortunately all kinds of damning evidence have been lost to time. Fire is older than paper.