To play devil&#x27;s advocate, saying &quot;but you can never ban encryption anyway&quot; sets up a false dichotomy. You&#x27;re right, there are open source projects that will survive no matter what you do. But you can certainly force or convince companies like Apple and Google to prevent those apps from being available in their stores, and you can force large companies like Facebook to give you a backdoor.<p>Sure, someone tech savvy can get around that, but not everyone. Just look at how many criminal cases end up finding emails explicitly talking about plans and crimes. So there are people nowadays not even using encryption when committing crimes. If you make encryption-by-default impossible, the amount of unencrypted messages will increase, and you&#x27;ll have gained those.<p>Now whether that&#x27;s good or bad is a separate discussion; I tend to think it&#x27;s bad, but that&#x27;s a more nuanced argument than &quot;you can&#x27;t ban it, so don&#x27;t do anything about it&quot;.