And just like the keys to my house, it requires an actual live physical human being to transport itself through meatspace at a non-relativistic speed in order to perform said circumvention, right? Oh, it doesn't? Hmmm.
This is why I'm hoping we can ultimately just let go of all these analogies for encryption. Analogies are training wheels, and if we leave them on for too long, we risk propagating the idea that all bikes have four wheels.
Analogies are pretty much precisely how we convey novel ideas. The problem is finding one which doesn't melt when pushed too hard.
I keep having to explain to my father that deleting data from storage doesn't speed up computers. Nor does leaking it. His response when I mentioned that the Panama Papers leaks were 2.6 terabytes of data was "well, that must have made their systems a lot faster" (because they were no longer bogged down by having 2.6 TB of data on them). That's wrong at least two ways: data-on-disk doesn't slow down computers, and leaking data (making a copy) doesn't remove it from the source.
And this is a reasonably intelligent human being. Who's used computers for many decades.
The context was of speeding other computer operations by removing data.
With a sufficiently robust indexing system, file search time is independent of corpus size. E.g., Google isn't scanning the Internet each time you submit a search query. Time to build an index increases, but not searches against it.
