> If the real reason is "there's several dozen foreign governments and organised criminal groups who are all using platforms like these to try to destabilise us

> If the real reason is "there's several dozen foreign governments and organised criminal groups who are all using platforms like these to try to destabilise us", then it's important to lie about it as much as possible so that those foreign governments and organised criminal groups don't catch on. If this was the real reason then they couldn't be advocating for bills to compromise the security of those systems, because the actual bad guys can perform logical deduction and conclude that the same compromises could be used against them and then switch to some other system. > States can't really function long-term if they permit encryption they themselves can't break, it's not stable This has been the case for quite some time and it's not only completely fine but in line with historical norms. Historically governments didn't have the capacity to intercept communications en masse, and the majority of communication took place in person with no record of what was said outside of the minds of the people in the room. Meanwhile targeted interception will always be available because governments can, in the limit, physically install bugs to record the target's conversations or passwords. And to the extent that you're dealing with a sophisticated adversary that knows how to scan for bugs, you're well past the point that legislating backdoors in messaging apps is relevant because a sophisticated adversary can use already-existent open source messaging systems without them.