Highlight week: Encryption & key demands

I'm going over some of my older posts and am reposting some of the good stuff that's still relevant. I've been at this a while, so there is a good week's worth of good essays hiding in the archives. 
This post from 2007 has been a top search-engine magnet, even though I'm not the one who coined the term that's getting the hits: Encryption and Key Demands

The situation I talked about in 2007 made XKCD in 2009, XKCD Gets it (unsurprisingly).

And the UK law I talk about in 2007 reaches a conviction, Encryption and key demands, in reality.