I think a better analogy for this sort of thing is an unknown location. It&#x27;s like you took some unencrypted text and hid it in a tree in a national forest.  Everyone strongly suspects that the unencrypted text existed in the past. It&#x27;s just that only one person knows how to access that text in the present.<p>The problem with the locked box analogy is that it implies that the cypertext is in some way equivalent to the plain text. In practice that isn&#x27;t really true. If you don&#x27;t have the key you don&#x27;t actually have the plain text. Nothing says you can&#x27;t look for it if you want. You could even hire a company to help you look. Can you force a company to look if that search would be against their business interests?