I've been a cypher geek for ages. I've used Signal before it was popular, PGP emails even when they were no longer popular, I've been an early enthusiastic supp

I've been a cypher geek for ages. I've used Signal before it was popular, PGP emails even when they were no longer popular, I've been an early enthusiastic supporter of ProtonMail, I was outraged by many of the decisions taken by the US government to break the right to encryption (and, most of all, harm the security of users through backdoors), and I'm alarmed now that the EU seems willing to follow a similar path. But I also try to walk in politicians' shoes. Security agencies have the right to monitor the traffic linked to activities that pose a threat to public security. And there's no way of saying "open a backdoor only for the bad guys". Just like a knife can be used both to cut an avocado and murder your wife, E2E encryption can be used both to guarantee freedom of speech in authoritarian regimes or protect intellectual property and PIIs, and to guarantee an un-monitored tool for the communications of terrorist organizations. So far the position of the tech community has largely been "our job is just to provide the tools, not to predict nor oversee the perils that they pose". And politicians are rightly frustrated with this approach. And frustration at some point inevitably turns into bad legislation, often done without consulting a tech community that has been deaf to their use-case for decades. Is it possible to build a tool or a technology that guarantees privacy while providing tools for investigators, without opening backdoors and without compromising legitimate use cases? I know, it's a hard question, it's not how E2E encryption was designed, but I have the impression that in all these years we haven't even tried and sit around a whiteboard to brainstorm some ideas, and we are simply shouting "but privacy...!" whenever a politician tries to boldly (and often clumsily) break the wall between them and us and implement legislation to regulate our lack of action.