>The way you would actually implement this is not by putting a "loophole" in or "watering down" the encryption between the parties. You'd do it by adding the go

>The way you would actually implement this is not by putting a "loophole" in or "watering down" the encryption between the parties. You'd do it by adding the government as another party. E.g., two party end-to-end encrypted messaging channels become three party end-to-end encrypted chats. Adding the government as a passive 3rd party to an e2e encrypted messaging service is pretty hard to do technically ... and it wouldn't necessarily give the government access to the messages. To read the traffic the government would need to recognize that a targeted party is communicating and have the right infrastructure in the right parts of the internet to intercept the traffic. 1. What happens if the government starts recording after the session has started. Do you build the crypto so that the government can join at any moment or only during session establishment. 2. All this intercept equipment would be expensive and unreliable. ASes may use encrypted tunnels between POPs or change which ASes it routes the messages around. Using China as an example the way this would proibably work is that the company that offers the messaging service would have all messages pass through their servers and then they would read messages in plaintext and save them in a database (think gmail). The government would be given API access to the database of all messages. Of course these datasets would then also be shared for marketing purposes, employees would read or steal the messages and hackers/foreign governments would also get access.