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Well, I imagine if they can snoop the messages and what they see "gibberish", that'll be an arrestable offence of "using encryption".

I imagine the Chinese chat apps have this. The above law might not be written anywhere, but if they see chats that are just "noise", they can pay you a visit. Or put you under surveillance.

I guess then one would have to invent coded languages.

Are they going to block binary files from being transferred? Maybe block images? It's an impossible task if someone really knows what they are doing.

Absolutely. Metadata notwithstanding, highly encrypted payloads and highly compressed payloads should theoretically be almost indistinguishable from each other as both operations have a technical side-effect of extremely high data entropy.

You could embed your encrypted messages in legitimate looking images, or any other type of file. There's no way to stop it.

I suppose doing encrypted comms really well is actually quite hard, and more susceptible to decryption.

Haven't we all received a password-protected file and password in the same email?

The authorities would then just block unintellible communications.