The politicians and national security bureaucrats advocating this are idiots. At least that's the charitable interpretation. The world is not static. Mass surve

The politicians and national security bureaucrats advocating this are idiots. At least that'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. Can't these people see that they're shooting themselves in the foot (assuming their true goal is to intercept the communications of the 'terrorists/communists/lizard people' hiding under your bed)? Encryption is hard. Properly implementing a system that incorporates it is even harder. I doubt 99.9% of the aforementioned 'enemies of the week' have the technical capability to do so (ok, maybe the commies do). But that's no problem now! They can just buy a product off the shelf thanks to the new mass market you've just created! Now they'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: "selectively". It feels like we're only a few iterations of this arms race away from our genius leaders pushing for telescreens to be installed in everyone's homes, to ensure they don't use any of that 'godless, un-american encryption that only evil lizard people use'. After all, if you're doing nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide.