The police also have all kinds of allowances that aren't afforded to regular citizenry to surveil and pry and monitor and track behaviour and map social contact

The police also have all kinds of allowances that aren't afforded to regular citizenry to surveil and pry and monitor and track behaviour and map social contacts and plant listening devices and watching devices and almost any other flavour of surveillance they can get a judge to sign-off. The problem with all of the above is that it takes human effort, which is costly. We've all seen the Pandoras Box that the likes of Google and Facebook have opened on automated behavioural decision making. Police want that, their quotas and their budgets neeeeeeeeeeeed iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttt like Renton needs that one last hit. Outsource our decisions to 'the infallible machine' so that we can answer "computer says no". No culpability, no responsibility, even less need to apply our x million-years-in-the-making built-in logic engines that once (maybe?) were directed and trained in how to be applied to the job of policing in order to better serve the public. Policing is meant to be difficult, because getting it wrong has great potential to completely fuck people's lives. If they can't "prove it" without access to the last morsel of individual privacy afforded by E2EE, then it's likely there's nothing to prove. Earn it you lazy fucks. Edited to add: A little bit of retrospective guilt in the offensively opinionated ending above, but I'm going to make it a bit worse and spread it a bit wider. It's politicians calling for this because it seems to "play in the electorate". So "earn it you lazy fucks" is directed at all the lazy fucks in the chain from ideas man to lobbyist to number-cruncher to adviser to political mouthpiece to sponsor of legislation to partisan supporters of the bill and even to the somewhat victims as the enforcers of bad legislation. An entire chain in which none of whom seem to have an understanding of the context of what they're promoting outside of "how it plays" or "this says you're doing illegal". Fuck them all out of an airlock.