Cameron wants to ban encryption

Putting aside the fact that it's technically unfeasible, if you had a ban like this why would it stop the terrorists? They're committing crimes already, a few more won't make any difference. Unless the encrypted traffic can either be stopped or decrypted (both of which are impossible if you plan to allow other encrypted data, for financial transactions as you suggested), there's no way to enforce such a ban other than prosecution.

TSR worker monkeys are aloud to express political viewpoints?

There is a very fine line regarding encryption which needs to be distinguished. Encryption is a vital method for securing financial transactions and is used by all major organisations. However, encryption can also abused by perpetrators of terrorism and those committing illegal activities. It would be unfeasible for the government to ban all encryption and would be severely objected to by large organisations, especially those in the finance industry. A ban on encryption for personal communications would be more suitable to allow the government to monitor and deter those who intend to commit such acts.

I'll just add that you can't ban encryption. It's impossible.

It's impossible to prove something is encrypted.

False.

Elaborate?

What I always want to know when it comes to this sort of thing is where are the millions of office workers or millions of £££ invested in some mad 1984 style super-computer examining the data? The government seems to want to cast a net on all forms of communication....but how do you then process it at all? I mean imagine rounding up every Facebook comment, every tweet, every snapchat etc...and what, looking for keywords? That's still going to give you millions of pieces of text a day which are meaningless and any terrorist worth their salt is going to A) Not make accounts which would associate with their ID, and not use phrases/words. which would make intent obvious.

If you use the correct algorithm and the key, it will produce an intelligible message.
Impossible is not the right word; very very difficult would be more accurate. Also some encryption methods have telltale markers that betray the algorithm used and that the entropy of the data is not as high as you would expect from white noise.

If you use the correct algorithm and the key, it will produce an intelligible message.
Impossible is not the right word; very very difficult would be more accurate. Also some encryption methods have telltale markers that betray the algorithm used and that the entropy of the data is not as high as you would expect from white noise.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I used to work in the defence industry. I know what governments want to do and what they have no intention of doing. I genuinely believe that this is a well meaning proposal and that it's not intended as an enabler for the government to be able to invade your privacy in a very intrusive way as part of some horrific dystopian police state, but its aims are not totally divergent from the effect it will achieve. I also believe that it won't happen and despite be being a supporter of this government, I will never support this proposal.

but if somehow it did I really can't see stuff like the above holding up in court.

tbh I can't see how the government would actually want to go to court without making North Korea/China/Saudi laugh in our faces.
I mean lets say we were mates who chatted online, for whatever reason, we sent messages via encryption. So if the government proves we're sending each other encrypted messages, and private users carrying out encryption is illegal, we're seriously going to potentially face jail-time for basically talking to each other in a secret language? We'd be the laughing stock of the world surely? You'd have countries like China being able to act all holier then thou over it.
Also I hope this doesn't apply to offline. As a toddler, party due to dyspraxia impacting my ability to learn pronunciation as well (or whatever medical BS it was about me being slow) I used to make up words for multiple things and would insist on using them, so a train was a lalorg, a plane was a lylaguy....kids encrypting!

Does that actually prove anything though? As you said in another post this law would be utterly unenforceable anyway and likely won't happen, but if somehow it did I really can't see stuff like the above holding up in court.

...it is more likely that before showing up for jury duty, all the jurors randomly put the same 7 numbers into the Powerball Lottery and won. That has a much greater chance of happening than a naturally occurring collision.

Well quite. That's not "proof" I guess... but in the astronomically unlikely event that the authorities managed to brute force an encryption key and decrypted the contents, you'd be hard pushed to argue that an intelligible message derived in a reproducible forensic manner, using realistic input parameters could have been obtained any other way. You'd be essentially arguing that a sea of monkeys with typewriters have reproduced the entire works of Shakespeare, rather than they successfully decrypted a message that you encrypted.
It's the same legal argument why the use of MD5 as a hashing algorithm (which as we know is fundamentally cryptographically broken) is still accepted as evidentiary quality crypto in a court of law. Rob Lee from SANS sums this up nicely in this blog post from 2009 using an analogy that an examiner called Scott Moulton used to defend MD5 in court on the subject of hash collisions and the attempt to discredit digital evidence on the basis of doubt that the evidence has not been tampered with:
Probability is everything in courts, especially where forensics are concerned.