I'm not sure they expect to actually get a technological solution. The prospect that scares me most about this isn't that officials are demanding the impossible

I'm not sure they expect to actually get a technological solution. The prospect that scares me most about this isn't that officials are demanding the impossible right now, it's whatever their next "counter-offer" is. I feel like there's a real risk of politicians settling on a licensing regime where a bank, payment processor, cloud platform, telco, etc. gets to use strong encryption iff it files the right paperwork and maintains a backdoor in its system (i.e. not in the encryption itself).