Encryption is either strong or it isn't - there's no room for a "breakable by governments but not by anyone else" tier of encryption. We learned this lesson the

Encryption is either strong or it isn't - there's no room for a "breakable by governments but not by anyone else" tier of encryption. We learned this lesson the hard way with "export grade crypto" - i.e. the reason why DVDs were so hilariously easy to decrypt. The safety margin of how many bits there are between "breakable with a smartphone" and "unbreakable by every computer on earth" is very thin, and it shifts a lot, so the NSA has no advantage over 'bad guys'. The moment the NSA can brute-force a key so can anyone with a botnet of compromised AWS instances. Alternative proposals to force messaging apps to provide decryption keys for otherwise securely encrypted material aren't any better, because computers and encryption algorithms cannot read and understand a court order[0]. So if the keys are held by the government then they can decrypt everything without actually needing to ask someone else and prove that all the constitutionally-mandated procedures were followed. If the keys are held by the communications service, then they can at least theoretically refuse an illegal order[1], but then they run the risk of insiders stealing people's secrets. Remember that the push for E2E encryption started specifically because of two related trends: - Intelligence agencies doing incredibly sketchy shit to bypass encryption at major tech companies (e.g. that NSA diagram explaining how you can get implants into Google datacenters and bypass the encryption) - Companies wanting to protect the privacy of their users from themselves, because they hire a lot of people with potentially too much access to the production equipment. Banning E2E, going back to "export grade encryption", or demanding decryption capability rolls both of these back significantly. You can engineer a key escrow / backdoor system to resist one particular kind of attack at the expense of making another easier, but you can't eliminate both while maintaining nonconsentual decryption capability. [0] This is a corrolary of that old IBM saying: "a computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision". [1] Let's put aside the whole "no expectation of privacy on metadata" nonsense for now. While that is already a privacy nightmare, opening up communications content to unlimited decryption is a bigger can of worms.