Pretty easy honestly.

You do something like remove section 230 (or whatever the EU equivalent is) that provides safe harbor from liability for transit providers like ISPs and content providers like websites that host user submitted content. You condition any safe harbor on the services in question being able to turn over and ID exactly who the offending person was without fail and tie any and every packet to a real world person. You make explicit that not being able to scrutinize content (because of encryption) is not an excuse. Thus someone pirating or sending CSAM over your network via a VPN makes you liable for not stopping them.

As a result this forces ISPs to block all encrypted traffic detected via deep packet inspection. Only traffic encrypted with public key infrastructure that has government issued keys that allow snooping on it is allowed.

Tada. There’s no way around this that doesn’t involve painstaking steganography which can possibly be nailed by AI anyways. Things like embedding a secret message in pictures you send with some pixels shifted to hide the data and your friend having a program and key that can decode it. Or things like taking all the capitalized letters and applying rot13 or something to them with some sort of algorithm but then you need to find a way to make the message intelligible on the surface as if you’re sending constant unintelligible messages you might get flagged and blocked or visited by the police (or the police get a warrant and have your mobile company deploy malware onto your devices and spy on you as a threat because of that).

The only other alternative is using alternative infrastructure. HAM radio type network transmission via a series of hops with similar activists but this wouldn’t be practical for most given the expense and the bandwidth would be awful. Also probably illegal and if they wanted to it would be trivially easy to identify and arrest those running these nodes and relays due to triangulation.

Turns out the whole liberal west with freedom of thought and speech was in fact a lie. Kept around to use as a stick to whack at the USSR with but now dropped at the first signs of serious popular discontent and trouble in favor of total control. Supposed values quickly dropped with no more excuse than “Russians” or “think of the children” or the usual criminals and terrorists.

They can’t stop a really determined actor from engaging in encrypted messaging but they can stop 98% of the population and that’s more than enough to control thought and action of the population.

people can already “vibe code” p2p encrypted apps for communications, its not that hard and it will only get easier to do.

HOWEVER. obviously not bullet proof, and once meaningful quantum computing combines with AI every keystroke and deleted message, every sneeze or fart you had near a smart phone or a router in your life will be recorded and accessed by it, at the will of its controllers.

every recorded secret will be known, or at least be accessible. the blackmail is gonna be off the chain hook. people are going to start doing things that make zero sense. and youll know why.

“in 2008, senator, you googled “how to tuck my wiener so i can fart into my urethra” in twelve separate variations, and when that didnt yield the results you wanted. you looked up “how to inject fart into urethra, safely”… now, you are going to vote yay on the children coal miners bill, or we’ll drop 2008s search history, and maybe take a look at 2014 to see how you discovered how you wanted to be a furrys “dog knotted bitch slave” while on vacation in vegas…looks like we have all the messages…every second of your visit was recorded by your cell phone and iWatch, all the way down to your heart rate spiking when “white fang” pegged you for the first time that weekend…so…its gonna be a…yay?”

When all fails, there is always Happy Net Box

They probably won’t bother actually enforcing a ban against you and a buddy using PGP by hand. What they don’t want is normies encrypting everything so they lose the ability to casually spy on the masses. At the point at which they care enough about you personally to notice you’re using PGP, you’ve already “committed suicide.”

The same way they prevent you from transmitting any other illegal content: they fine you and/or throw you in jail if they know you’re doing it.

It’s trivially easy to detect encrypted messages just by measuring the entropy of each message. A messaging provider would just turn you in if they detect it.

You could probably get away with peer-to-peer messaging, but your ISP would be able to detect that you’re using unapproved encryption and then turn you in to the government.

Ham radio in the US has restrictions on sending encrypted data over ham frequencies.

They can’t stop you, they probably won’t even catch you unless you are egregious about it. But if they do catch you, it’s like a $10,000 fine.

I think the whole world is quickly moving closer to China’s model. Everything that gets encrypted will need the government’s key on it anything they can’t decrypt will get blocked.

You basically set up some rules at the backbone level looking for suspect traffic. They could now have AI review the suspect traffic and try to tell if what’s going on is viable data or nonsense words/coded messages. All communications will need to be identified. None of the blocking would work real time but once they know who’s sending it in think that you’ve sent some stuff that you shouldn’t be sending they could just turn you off.

I read an article somewhere recently where AI was able to tell if an image was being used with even the most advanced steganography with a fairly high reliability.

They’ll never be able to stop people from privately communicating at small scale, But man will there be some watch lists.

They can’t stop you. But they can criminalize your behavior.

It becomes yet another tool in the toolbox, if you become a person of interest, the tool comes out and they start hitting you with it.

The fact that it’s impossible to implement isn’t important.

That’s exactly what makes the proposed regulation so absurd. If you’re not completely tech illiterate, you’re gonna use whatever fork of your FOSS software of choice to keep communicating securely. This regulation is just a very obvious data grab for the whatsapp users that are too lazy to switch.

They would have to regulate the clients that you and your friend use. So if you do it with pen and paper they can’t do anything about it.

If you have a deck of cards, you have the ability to send securely