I am all for privacy and so on, however you have to admit that with the current technology alone it's basically impossible to track or prevent certain types of

I am all for privacy and so on, however you have to admit that with the current technology alone it's basically impossible to track or prevent certain types of crimes - and it's becoming more and more difficult. I am decently sure that terror attacks are prevented on a monthly/yearly basis - luckily, it doesn't make the news, when it does it's too late. Child pornography is another beast difficult to solve - again, I am quite sure that they are able to find groups etc on a more frequent basis than we think. When they don't, I don't even want to think about it. What tools do current investigators have? If you were a detective investigating a case, what would you do or use? Basically everything useful is either 1) illegal, or 2) technically almost impossible to do (e.g, decrypting https which takes still years to brute force). You could try to ask for a favor left and right to get to a search warrant or install spying devices and "fix" (1) but how the hell do you break (2)? Communication is happening online and a "military grade encrypted channel" has basically become the standard way of communicating with each other. The few who still use outdated clients or protocols - shame on them. So, yeah, I really do understand the fact that governments want access to data for their own nasty purposes, however, what can we do as a society to make it 1) difficult for average Joe to use military grade encryption to act criminal, 2) easier for police to find criminals? I know a knife can be used to cut bread or to kill someone, however, we're talking here about groups of hundreds of people sharing child pornography - that's not a knife, it's a freaking weapon of mass destruction in the hands of people who shouldn't ever ever have access to them. No, I don't want the Chinese way, but what can we do to avoid getting there? Can you think of something?