Your analogy, to the extent that only you understand what remains after applying the standardized decryption, actually has one more cipher at the end that the attackers don't know, which puts it into the "unknown cipher-text" case.

Maybe. But I don't know that at that point it's a question about what cipher was used... just how to make the resultant data useful for, as you said, predict future data.

You seem to be specifically asking about how to "crack the code" -- I'm saying that even if you "cracked the code", you would still need to understand what's going on with the underlying plaintext.

Maybe put it this way... assume that the underlying text is a data dump of (x,y) coordinates and to "predict future data", you need the equation of the best fit line. We very well might be saying the same thing, but here's how I see things:

• Me: You arrive at this record encrypted with a cipher. You decrypt it. But then you still don't know how to make the data useful because mathematics is not currently advanced enough to produce a curve for the best fit line.
• You: You arrive at this record encrypted with a cipher. You decrypt it. The fact that you can't make it useful means it's still encrypted.

Does that seem like an accurate representation?

If so, then perhaps it's not exactly encryption, but "writing an interpretation program that can take what we don't yet see as a useful data-stream and making it useful."

Thus, we could look at whatever it is in nature you want to look at, run some program on it, and have an increase in prediction abilities.

Put one last way, imagine that MS Word has not been invented yet but "nature" writes her secrets in a .doc file and then encrypts it. I think we're disagreeing primarily on whether or not once it's decrypted if the resultant file is still "encrypted" or not.

I get the sense that you're saying it is, and I'm saying it's not. According to nature, it's right there for the taking. According to you, we still need one more level of "decryption" -- inventing MS Word.