Taking into account it is Windows, even if it the traffic is "encrypted", I suppose the part of the OS that encrypts it is not obfuscated in any way, so it should be easy to know what it really is doing.
You don't need to bust open the codebase itself to figure out what comms are occurring. You can stage your own MITM attack against yourself with a couple of home made SSL certificates and a router you have the ability to install your own software on.
Look at the context to decide if someone is using it to imply something is bad/evil/scary, in this case you cannot draw that conclusion. The OP is clearly just using it instead of italics.