I do believe that the U.S. can&#x27;t &quot;ban encryption&quot;, any more than it could &quot;ban mathematics&quot;.<p>That doesn&#x27;t mean the intelligence value to legally enforced backdoors in popular US-created or US-marketed products isn&#x27;t significant.<p>For one thing, your target might not be sophisticated or suspicious enough to avoid these products, or they may be communicating with folks who aren&#x27;t (for example, if you&#x27;re studying recruitment).<p>For another, requiring anyone desiring to hide their communication to eschew popular products itself provides a signal that may be of interest. And a diversity of smaller encrypted products may end up being more vulnerable to subversion and exploitation, vs. widely used, deeply studied systems.<p>I am not arguing that this value is worth the massive privacy and civil liberties tradeoff of giving the government access to products like iMessage. But it&#x27;s not, I think, as simple as saying, &quot;the bad guys will just switch to using other tools&quot;.