Every single ones of those techniques can and would be bypassed (the app store banning would be the easiest). The ISPs would be operating on an &quot;anti-virus&quot; principle, and they&#x27;d be too slow to stop &quot;zero-day-like&quot; hiding of encrypted communications before an attack would happen. There are already plenty of apps that stop carriers from knowing when someone is using tethering apps, when the carriers don&#x27;t want them to use those types of apps.<p>As someone was saying on Twitter, intelligence agencies <i>should not</i> want terrorists to start using steganography...which would make their passive traffic analysis <i>much harder</i>. But if they start censoring and banning encryption apps (which use metadata all in the clear), that&#x27;s exactly what will happen.<p>Also, it seems most people live with the impression that &quot;if only <i>current</i> apps such as Signal, Tor, etc&quot; would be banned, that should pretty much put an end to encrypted, hidden communications, right? Wrong. <i>Dead wrong</i>. Right now they are being &quot;lazy&quot; and just use what&#x27;s available to them, like Telegram and whatnot. But if those apps were actively banned, they would focus on building their own, perhaps with forked Signal&#x2F;Telegram sources. But even without those, they could still commit to building their own solutions.<p>To give you an analogy, look what&#x27;s happening with the Silk Road-like world. Authorities stopped Silk Road - like twice or third times already. But the underground online drug market is <i>bigger than ever</i> - it just split into multiple smaller markets. If that happened with <i>drug businesses and drug delivery</i>, it should be much easier to happen with &quot;chat apps&quot;.<p>People would still want strongly encrypted apps <i>especially</i> if they were actively banned by oppressive governments.