Comment by xp84

Yes, encryption is one of the most “cat’s out of the bag” situations - even assuming every company worldwide is cowed into submission by governments to add back doors, all they’re going to be catching is the dumb and unsophisticated criminals and even that will diminish as even the dummies realize every text and call is wiretapped once people start seeing their private communiques come out in court.

I suppose there are people in the camp advocating for back doors who still think it’s worth the tremendous downsides to be able to catch that group of criminals (there are certainly plenty of idiot criminals), but anybody can just use plain GPG emails for free, or deploy some open source encrypted chat server on a $20 a month cloud instance… and I assume operators in places like Russia or China won’t mind hosting easy services for less nerdy criminals willing to pay in crypto.