Encryption - Point-to-Point - Clearly Australians Don't Understand!
1. Encryption. Even if a government was to get access to the plain text of the encrypted messages created by some public service or another, all they would find is that the bad guys had implemented their own cipher before sending. (See below for a book cipher example.)
2. Point-to-Point. Most of the uninformed debate seems to ASSUME that bad guys use point-to-point communications (examples would be email, phone calls) where the end points are identifiable. But if a message is published on a web page (e.g. The Register, see below), then the sender will be hard to identify, and the recipient even harder.
3. Time to Read. Both items above have a useful asymmetry for the bad guys, who get:
-- real-time communication
-- anonymity (at least for a while)
....while the so-called good guys get:
-- a delay (perhaps quite a long delay) in reading the message
-- a delay (perhaps quite a long delay) in identifying the parties communicating
4. Book Ciphers. I hear lots of chatter about "forcing the bad guy" to hand over the encryption key or keys. This is another assumption that something like PGP is being used. But (for example) book ciphers don't have a "key". Even worse, if the bad guys have an agreed set of one time pads ahead of time, there is NO KEY. In both cases, the asymmetry mentioned above means that by the time you have a bad guy in custody to extract information about the cipher regime, it's almost certainly way too late.
5. Book Cipher example...feel free to publish the plain text here.
3650A667A55F13D30C4E5D5145AFA56762C2C951
36F680338E71E6167EC365D7950D5606EC23456E
35411033863039606CFF06D472E7D854BB95197B
1F708202F00D1F21FF5D4E7F166BC55EE870FF73
012A8286496CFC62B95F2DFEC5F60E5DA236A21C
41D7E425136643B059816A88D1B5B534D1D64756
3043E47D160C18E124BA6FD67699535D4F114880
0ADD8479A3501FC09BC17100D28D0770A8C57D8F
37A955F46713D0216A1A28E3943E3072D3C13DCB
48B5504BE8274F81EF510D5912C1B0194964D9DE
55CC961DF851D524663845C9E26A642CCC15291C
38A7126965