Dear Jay,

I was not referring to the internet, but since you mentioned it, any serious militants wouldn't use the world-wide-web and similar public interfaces, but use their own protocols instead based directly on UDP or TCP/IP, encrypted and channelled through several servers in different countries. No decipherable meta-data is then produced. The only ones being spied on would then be ordinary people like us. Also, according to the new legislation, ISP businesses can be coerced to act immorally against their conscience (or otherwise close down) - it's one thing for police itself to gather information, yet another to force innocent people to do police-work themselves whether they like it or not.

Likewise, if an Islamist is intent on travelling to join the fighting in Syria, all they need is to purchase an innocent-looking trip to Bali (or to one of those fashionable "climate-change" conferences). Real underground is not captured by such clumsy means, but ordinary innocent travellers do suffer.

Now I understand that you can't think at the moment about anything but Islam, but the world did have other issues before, still has and will still have, which have nothing to do with Islam. The Nazis and communists were not Islamic and the first revolt against Assad in Syria was not by Islamists.

More important than pretending to keep Islam away is to ensure that if we are ever besieged by a totalitarian regime, there would still be the technical means for popular resistance to form and succeed.

Any terrorist or anyone else who wants to keep private messages private only needs to use a simple unbreakable code.
Then the 'Powers' can only guess about the contents.

Example:
3-1-2-3-4-5-6-16-28-9-10-11-12.
5-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13.

Go for it, a lucky guess will be better than a computer programme.

Dear Yuyutsu,
You wrote "But if those freedoms that we currently [still] enjoy are taken away by government, then Islamic fundamentalism would no longer be a threat - because there will be nothing further to take."
This is a true statement for the hopefully unlikely scenario of this and/or future governments removing our current civil liberties to an extent rendering us akin to those prevailing under IS or other past totalitarian regimes.
I do not think the "thin edge of the wedge" argument should preclude a nuanced discussion of what restrictions to civil liberty might be justifiable in a variety of situations.
I am a strong supporter of civil liberties and do not approve of the recent section 35 legislation or section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act.
To anyone interested in free speech I would recommend "In defence of freedom of speech from ancient greece to Andrew Bolt' by Chris Berg.

Encyphering your messages is a great way to attract attention.
PGP is very good and would take the authorities so long to crack that it would be far too late anyway.
Anything that is on the internet can be traced in a little time and
I would be very surprised if the you know who don't run many of the proxies.
There are limited ways in & out of the country and to get to the proxies you must use them.

There is a way to do it and it would take the authorities ages to first wake up to its
existence and then work out what is needed to decode it, then decypher it to get the text.
The next problem is to find out who was receiving it.

Dear Bazz,

PGP is OK, but nothing is as good as writing your own encryption method.

Theoretically, your method could and is even likely to be inferior, but governments would never have the resources to run after and crack everyone's private encryption method.

No Yuyutsu, I will guarantee my method would be not only
have the pgp encyphering but I seriously doubt any government agency would
even know it was there.
Because I realise the power of it, I am not going to describe it except to say
that it does not use the internet.

Just like systems like power grids should never be on the internet.