"Where does one draw the line between encryption,encoding and compression for example?" I am told that the FBI does not actually draw such a distinction when d

"Where does one draw the line between encryption,encoding and compression for example?" I am told that the FBI does not actually draw such a distinction when dealing with criminal messages. The term "null cipher" is used to refer to messages encoded in a non-randomized fashion that does not involve any secret key. I was being a bit sarcastic above, but honestly, I would not be surprised if the government tried to claim that base64 encoding counted as "encryption" in this situation.