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.
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.
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.
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.
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.