>I think what you're missing, is the comic shows a scene with two guys, and the discussion shows the guy is in the other room.

There are no guys in the other room 99.999999999% of the time. And it's mostly out of scope.

>And points out how encryption is useless in such a situation

Which is wrong. You're doing a great job of illustrating the problem. Encryption is not useless, it's still doing its exact job which is forcing the threat model to shift from undetectable electronic to real world physical. Thanks to encryption, you now have knowledge and choice. You now know that they wanted the data, enough to commit crimes for it. You know they have it if you comply.

>And this is just the sort of situation you end up in, if the law decides you'd better hand over your password.

I'm interested in your statistics on times when the FBI beat American citizens with lead pipes to get them to hand over their passwords. Please do share. Then also share the big smiles on defense attorney faces afterwards during the resulting motions to suppress all evidence and subsequent 7-8 figure civil rights lawsuits. In countries that allow jail or torture for it, well first many may choose not to travel there. Or travel there only with throwaway data. Even there though encryption still serves some value, again in knowing but also opening up more degrees of freedom for how to respond. In a western country that requires decryption but does still have some respect for human rights and rule of law, you may for example be able to have your defense lawyer insist on witnesses to the access, and that the access warrant will be limited in scope ahead of time. Here encryption makes it far harder to plant evidence transparently, or conduct completely unrestricted fishing expeditions. It may allow more avenues for appealing a case. Same reason that you should never consent to just allow police to "look around" your house or car. Sure, they can beat you up and break in. But there would be consequences to that.

>So the point is, encryption is useless in some circumstances.

Again, it's not useless. Physical attacks are outside of encryption's threat model, indeed forcing attackers into physical attack is the exact point. That's vastly more expensive for attackers than non-physical attacks, and gives far more options for defenders. If your data is unencrypted, it can just be silently copied off with you none the wiser.

>Really, you should level your complaints at people using this humorous comic wrong. Not the author.

You just used this comic wrong though! Because it's a bad comic, and the message is all wrong. I think it's fairly obvious that it wasn't intended to some super subtle wrong point to promote discussion, or if it was then it's too subtle because I've never seen it cited in any way but played straight.

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Edit to reply to below:

>You are instead blathering on about all sorts of other scenarios, and failing to see that the encryption is utterly useless in that circumstance, because the point is you will give up your password, period.

As I took the time and made real effort to explain to you, encryption is not at all useless in those scenarios. There is more to encryption then merely giving up the password or not, same as there is more to a lock or safe then whether it gets broken into or not. You are wrong. And then of course having failed to address anything, you retreat into "oh it's all humor (somehow)".

Still, good to know you're the kind of person that finds torture and flagrant rights violations funny. As an American I'm not into that myself, but will acknowledge humor is highly subjective.