I don't think I missed the point, that point's pretty obvious. All of us on HN recognize that the legal frameworks of the US and the UK (and other countries) are screwed up, and we don't need this particular post to point that out. The looming totalitarianism manifests itself elsewhere with even more clarity.

My point, admittedly facetiously expressed before, was an aside, and it is that hey, we know the government's screwed up, and it's not likely to get much better soon (especially on this particular issue) without a fundamental shift away from Big Government (and more debatable, a Massarchy implementation of government). In the meantime, there are technical solutions around it which we could implement en-masse today for the benefit of the masses instead of the localized solutions like GnuPG that us privileged nerds have--and it's worth reminding/letting be known by budding smarty-pantses that they too can communicate with other smarties securely if they want to. (I suspect any dangerous terrorists already do communicate securely and don't need reminding, but most terrorists are dumb and ineffectual in whatever their particular goals are so most probably don't.)

If only Joe Public was educated about it and motivated to care and demand... Does a gmail-to-gmail message stay on Google's network alone? If not, they should encrypt everything behind the scenes before it leaves their network, just like how they've now been using https by default. It limits gov. snooping to subpoenaing the specific email provider to get the data off their servers rather than catching it in real-time as it passes through some network node. Also, I think that most probably gmail-to-hotmail or gmail-to-yahoo goes outside, so you can expand. Why can't Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo each agree to roll out an auto-PGP system where when an email is sent to one of the others, a handshake occurs first where a one-time public key is swapped from receiver to sender that's used to encrypt before sending, and the receiver will decrypt before presenting the decrypted email to the receiver user? (And to the receiving user's provider's content-scanners to display targeted ads.) With similar legal implications, the public could always demand regulations that require an auto-PGP protocol alongside a requirement of https (even though https isn't as secure as it could be). But that would be an instance of the government looking out for its people when the private companies aren't doing so, therefore it's not going to happen.

It's hard to enforce any anti-encryption laws beyond monitoring for distribution of specific software and monitoring for users who encrypt almost everything. Basically you can only catch someone using encryption for almost everything by noticing that none of their data is understood by any of your software. If you only encrypt important things, well, a steg'd image once in a while isn't going to be detected (and there are other things you can do too).