It's basically meaningless to talk about whether something is encrypted without the "from who" factor. Otherwise you might as well rot-13 it. If you want to use such a narrow definition of 'encrypted', then it doesn't matter if the lawyer knows the answer.
No, the answer is way simpler than you are making it out to be.
Is the data in a TLS connection transformed in such a way that it would make it difficult for an intermediary to figure out the plain information being sent?
If so, the data is in fact encrypted. Where are you getting this idea that encryption is more than that? That is by definition what encryption is, and everything else is just approaches and security layers on top of it. You don't have to like the encryption method, you don't have to care who it's from, you don't have to care about anything else. Encryption is encryption even if it's as pointless as a caesar cipher.
And yeah, there's things like certificates and CAs with HTTPS, but that's totally secondary to the encryption part. No one would bother with HTTPS if it couldn't establish encrypted connections.
If a lawyer or a judge doesn't understand that they themselves are frequently using encryption when they use the internet, that's a problem. They don't need to care about the nitty gritty details that you and others bring up. If they view encryption as something that only bad guys use, why should they be a part of the judicial system in the year 2021?
'difficult' is uncomfortably vague here. Lots of transforms happen to the bits that might make them difficult to figure out even without encryption. Many of them don't intend to keep people out, despite them being more obscuring than a ceaser cipher!
I feel like you're overdefining encryption to make a point, when you don't need to at all.
I've made the definition as simple as it could possibly be. Technically speaking, yes, rot13 is a form of encryption; it's just a really bad one that has virtually no security features, only being a minuscule step above plain text. Rot13 even has a decryption key, but only ever one, which is the algorithm to decode it. (Of course it would not take long at all to reverse engineer) Besides, any encryption other than OTP can be broken in theory given enough time.
Honestly, I haven't the faintest clue the point you are making or why you are nitpicking to this degree. I think I made it clear why legal and judicial professionals should have a rudimentary understanding and awareness of encryption for the purpose of making sound decisions that affect society. If your disagreement with my definition of encryption gets in the way of that for you, then I really don't know what to say. Look up what the word "encrypt" means, think of the etymology, and rethink what you've been saying.
> Honestly, I haven't the faintest clue the point you are making or why you are nitpicking to this degree. I think I made it clear why legal and judicial professionals should have a rudimentary understanding and awareness of encryption for the purpose of making sound decisions that affect society.
You're asking for them to have a very strange understanding of encryption, that doesn't match how the term is normally used. The important part is the security, not that you need an algorithm to decode. It's not nitpicking to say you're asking for them to know something irrelevant that's adjacent to some important things they should understand.
