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It shouldn't be hard to believe because there is no difference whatsoever. You could do bank transactions over chat, you could run chat over bank transactions. Both are fundamentally the same thing. The mathematical model that says that Alice exchanges information with Bob is not a simplification, it's fundamentally how it works. Content is arbitrary and doesn't matter.

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Put more simply. If the terrorist wants to stay safe they would exploit any loophole. If conversation is backdoored but banking is not, they could use online banking and code word type messages in transaction descriptions that move trivial amounts of money back and forth between multiple accounts.

You are ignoring the bandwidth differences between protocols.

You don't need much bandwidth. The Internet is creating a false sense of data size because nowadays even a simple hello world seems to require a multi-megabyte download. But actual communication for practical purposes can be done in just bytes. There's more than enough space in transfer title to communicate a lot of stuff, even without a pre-arranged set of shortcuts, and in planning stages, you don't need real-time communication anyway.

(Note, this comment would fit in one or two bank tranfers).

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