> But the counter to that counter-argument is that the traditional methods of interception had a significant practical cost and therefore an incentive to use th

> But the counter to that counter-argument is that the traditional methods of interception had a significant practical cost and therefore an incentive to use them only when there was a legitimate interest in doing so. The large scale surveillance also existed in the analog time see the GDR or programs like ECHELON. That's why for many politicians this is supposedly only an issue of "scaling up", which has also been happening [0] and then got blown wide open with Snowden revealing PRISM&co. This hostility to cryptography is also anything but new: Cryptography in many countries is still subject to strict regulations and has been for decades [1], while intelligence agencies like the NSA do spend quite some efforts in undermining even the process of standardization [2]. Let's also not forget that for a really long time the majority of the Internet didn't even use any TLS for most of its traffic, once we got https rolled out somewhat widespread, guess what happened? Hearthbleed, weird how that went down. Feels more like they want to legalize a whole lot of what's been going on anyway. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but at this point, it's difficult not to be. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center [1] http://www.treachery.net/~jdyson/crypto/tattoo.html http://www.treachery.net/~jdyson/crypto/tattoo.html [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-interne...