When lawmakers and cops propose banning working cryptography (as they often do in the USA), or ban it outright (as they just did in Australia), they are long on talk about "responsible encryption" and the ability of sufficiently motivated technologists to "figure it out" and very short on how that might work — but after many years, thanks to the UK's spy agency MI5, we have a detailed plan of what this system would look like, and it's called "ghost users."

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has made a name for himself as a crypto warrior who promotes a murky idea called "responsible encryption," through which software would somehow be designed so that its security worked 100% of the time when criminals and foreign governments were trying to break it, but fail 100% of the time when the US government was trying to break it.