Australia's war on encryption: the sweeping new powers rushed into law

Australia has made itself a global guinea pig in testing a regime to crack encrypted communication

In the hit US TV series The Wire police are initially baffled when the criminal suspects they are investigating begin to communicate through photographic messages of clock faces.

After several seasons of plots driven by the legalities and logistics of setting up telephone intercepts on suspected drug dealers, the police can't keep up when overheard conversations are replaced by an inscrutable form of pictorial code.