Read all of the First Law series last year and man.. Its good stuff. I think Logan Nine-Fingers is one of my favorite characters ever.
Its definitely more dark and grimey than a lot of the fantasy I've read, but I think the characters are more interesting because of it.
So something I've never quite gotten, is what's to stop someone from just running a message through pgp before using an insecure app? The math is out of the bag already.
Not only that, those backdoors going to be really big juicy targets for bad actors and they will be cracked by someone either publicly or privately in a matter of months..