Well, we know quite well that if a person were to be only interested in the letter of the law - never the spirit, its interpretation, how it is practices, or ho

Well, we know quite well that if a person were to be only interested in the letter of the law - never the spirit, its interpretation, how it is practices, or how it interacts with other laws - and not interested in any channel of information that isn't blessed by a government representative, that there would be a reductionist bias that misses the broader strokes important to understanding current policy. For those reading it should be clear that the US 'voluntells' US corporations to provide access to information and keys and to build in key escrow mechanisms through regulatory and financial leverage, through partnerships, contracts and kickbacks, legal pressure, and otherwise. Tap and trace laws force telecommunications companies to subvert over-the-wire encryption - they can not subvert end-to-end encryption because they do not provide it. However Bush era interpretations of tap-and-trace and pen register laws expanded analog and phone communications to digital media. Skype, for example was fully and willingully subverted (Snowden docs, again) - the end-to-end crypto removed from the original versions of the product. If one enters into these conversations only wanting to examine single sentences of law and not the legal process/architecture, one fundamentally introduce a bias. That's okay (freedom of speech). But readers beware that they aren't going to be able to get a full story from legal reductionism.