Many governments (US, Australia, all dictatorships) want to make end-to-end encryption illegal and prevent IT firms from providing it. The open-source community can create their own encryption software, but the creators and users of this could be punished as well. The reasoning of the governments for banning encryption is that criminals and terrorists use it. However, the same reasoning applies to knives, guns and cars, which are used much more directly to harm people and yet are strangely excluded from the ban. This contradiction makes me doubt the motives of these governments.
The obvious solution to a ban on some software is to camouflage it and its products. The code for the encryption software could be hidden in a seemingly nonexistent part of computer memory or blended in one log file among many, perhaps encrypted as well.
The encrypted messages passing through the internet should not look like encrypted messages, but would be embedded in innocuous-looking files. A simple way is to change the colour of some pixels in a self-made photo or video file, with the locations of the relevant pixels being known to the sender and receiver, but secret from others. The colours of the pixels can encode the data. Someone intercepting the picture or video would have to spend significant resources analysing it to find whether some pixels are of an unusual colour, especially if the starting image is riotously colourful and confusing. Publicly available images are not useful, because comparing the message-image with the original reveals the changed pixels.
A more sophisticated version of this idea has already been done by http://camouflage.unfiction.com/ A similar idea is to hide one’s browsing history in random websurfing (http://www.qqqtech.com/about.html), but this only hides the relative frequencies of websites visited, not the fact of visiting a site on a government watchlist that most people don’t visit.