You can&#x27;t solve political problems with cryptography, much though the software engineering industry may wish it were so.<p>Ultimately, though it will be very hard to accept, crypto may be on the way out as a technology with any political impact. Governments currently accept the rapid increase in SSL because none of the politicians or regulators understand that it&#x27;s possible to disable it at a country level, and nobody with any technical clue has been willing to point it out to them. But that situation isn&#x27;t sustainable, as the Kazakh example shows. A sufficiently determined government won&#x27;t care about minor details like user convenience. They&#x27;ll just say &quot;you either install our root cert, or you don&#x27;t get to use the internet&quot; and that&#x27;s it. Game over. If even just one western country does it, the rest will all follow within a few years.