Banking doesn&#x27;t strike me as a use-case that the government needs to worry about, since a mandate already exists to report financial information and suspicious banking activity to law enforcement. A backdoor would be more <i>convenient</i> for them, but encryption of your communications between you and the bank does not mean the bank is encrypting your financial and demographic information in such a way that they themselves will not be able to retrieve it.<p>What&#x27;s being discussed here is the Apple strategy, where the service provider can provide a service to the public without the ability to retrieve information generated by the service.<p>The desire for companies to provide such services was likely spurred by the government&#x27;s insistence that they provide private encryption keys, even in the event that they provide access to encrypted information not limited to the direct subject of a warrant, and the federal courts&#x27; repeated confirmation of the government&#x27;s power to enforce such requests. See the demise of Lavabit [1].<p>There are numerous technical workarounds to this problem; for example, a private-key infrastructure that generates one key pair per message, or per customer. However, none of those workarounds allow a service provider to market products that are end-to-end secure from eavesdropping or the later revelation of the customer&#x27;s information to empowered third parties.<p>So in essence, the argument I&#x27;m making is that it <i>doesn&#x27;t matter</i> if there is a fundamental difference between banking and a chat application, because in either case the government either already has or is actively seeking the power to obtain the information you generate.<p>As it&#x27;s hard to imagine a world where malicious parties would not be able to obtain encrypted communication mechanisms (unless you ban open-source, computers, pens, and the human brain), it&#x27;s difficult to reconcile the above with the proposed effect this law would have, and it&#x27;s <i>very</i> difficult to imagine the government restricting the application of these new powers to terrorist organizations only. See the history of the Patriot Act, for example [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lavabit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lavabit</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;the-watch&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;29&#x2F;surprise-controversial-patriot-act-power-now-overwhelmingly-used-in-drug-investigations&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;the-watch&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;29&#x2F;...</a>