> no system can ever be secure as long as the host has some way of intercepting messages.

Erm, that's only the case for systems that use cleartext in transit. If you encrypt and decrypt (and we assume you're doing it right) at the endpoints then the intermediate can't do anything with the content.

Your 'no matter how' bit is correct, and it was flawed to rely on SSL for transit only and hope the law would protect the keys. Hence tqbf's point that using cleartext in-out is just plain bad to begin with.