The politicians and national security bureaucrats advocating this are idiots. At least that&#x27;s the charitable interpretation. The world is not static. Mass surveillance leads to mass demand, and therefore mass markets, for privacy products (e.g. VPNs, secure messaging). And a product will only be used by the masses if it is easy to use.<p>Can&#x27;t these people see that they&#x27;re shooting themselves in the foot (assuming their true goal is to intercept the communications of the &#x27;terrorists&#x2F;communists&#x2F;lizard people&#x27; hiding under your bed)? Encryption is hard. Properly implementing a system that incorporates it is even harder. I doubt 99.9% of the aforementioned &#x27;enemies of the week&#x27; have the technical capability to do so (ok, maybe the commies do). But that&#x27;s no problem now! They can just buy a product off the shelf thanks to the new mass market you&#x27;ve just created!<p>Now they&#x27;re trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle by banning encryption. Banning encryption? What does that even mean? How are you going to enforce that? I suspect the answer to the latter is: &quot;selectively&quot;.<p>It feels like we&#x27;re only a few iterations of this arms race away from our genius leaders pushing for telescreens to be installed in everyone&#x27;s homes, to ensure they don&#x27;t use any of that &#x27;godless, un-american encryption that only evil lizard people use&#x27;.<p>After all, if you&#x27;re doing nothing wrong you&#x27;ve got nothing to hide.