ZDNet: RIP: Government claims no mass surveillance (fwd)

[Adam Atkinson (ETL)]

> Surely if I were to write a document in Welsh (or French, to take
> relatively uncomplicated examples), it would be up to the CPS to find
> a translator.
> 
> Why should it be any different if the language I happen to use to
> converse with correspondent X is Navajo or Klingon or
> English-written-using-the-Arabic-alphabet or whatever. 

I don't know.

> Surely it is
> only unintelligible if it is "encoded" in such a way that only myself
> and correspondent X can understand it?

This is why one of my examples was thieves' cant. A possible way
around RIP could be designing your own language which you teach
to members of your (criminal or other) community. I've heard of
people who use Sanskrit to hold private conversations in the
presence of others. (Mind you, this kind of thing can backfire,
cf. "Nice Work" by David Lodge.)

As previously discussed on the list, you could also exchange chunks
of the human genome, or random numbers, or something. I fairly frequently
exchange emails with people which contain probability distributions
we've obtained by calculation or simulation, trying to model an
unpleasant real problem with easier-to-do ones. I'm not sure what
I would do if I had to prove that (say) 6000 lines of this stuff
wasn't a code.