Which immediately made most of literature and theology illegal. You couldn't posses a poem or a bible unless you could explain to the police any hidden symbolism!
Pictures of the police kicking down doors and shouting "you're nicked - now explain what the poet really meant by a host of yellow daffodils"
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php
Computer programmers think, aha, I can apply an arbitrary algorithmic translation to input A and get output B, and applying the law to B would be absurd, so therefore applying the law to A is also absurd. What they fail to realize is that bits have color -- a type of metadata that law algorithms can see and operate on which your computer algorithms are ignorant of.
You think that encrypted contents of a computer harddrive is a logically equivalent operation to writing things in a form only comprehensible to oneself. This is only true if you're Colorblind.
This entirely depends on whether you view your computer as an extension of your personal consciousness or as being an external service that you're interacting with. I'd rather a society where computers act as individuals' agents, rather than people being at the mercy of the computers.
Big file that is storing your n-th computed prime : innocuous.
Big file that is storing pirated movie, even if called "n-th prime" : not OK.
In most (democratic) countries you do not have to cooperate with the police if they have a warrant. So they are allowed to search your house, they are allowed to break your lock/door, but you are not obligated to give them the key to your house.
It's already the same with digital things: The police can get a warrant and is then allowed to try to crack my password. But I'm not obligated to give them the key.
The difference is in the consequences of refusal. For a home search, it's usually in your best interest to open the door because it's really easy for the police to break it down. For an encrypted hard drive, it's nearly impossible to retrieve the data if you refuse to decrypt it.
In most countries the police don't get a search warrant for your head - except where you are wearing an orange jumpsuit and having water poured down your throat.
If you're referring to waterboarding, the water goes in your nose and sinuses, not your throat. And the amount of water used is very small.
The aim is not to drown the person. It is to trigger the drowning reflex. Which happens very fast when you are unable to move.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPubUCJv58 for a demonstration of how exactly it is done and what it looks like.