Comment by ben_w

>While I agree with the sentiment, you need to think like a state to stop this kind of thing.

I'm thinking like state already, i would never trust ANY state with such powers, even the one that was perfectly aligned with my political views.

It's not issue of state, but dilution of responsibility and the way the votes are counted.

It is also an issue of unelected officials deciding things - the whole system is broken.

Before you say that heads of state were elected - this is highly contentious issue, no one ran on this in internal campaigns, and votes on this issue are counted country-wide(all for or all against), without any regards to distribution of populace's opinion on this subject.

>Even without any argument about personal rights and what's totalitarian, I can't even square the circle of the unstoppable force of "the economy is dependent on encryption that can't be hacked" with the immovable object of "hostile governments and organised criminals undermine ${insert any nation here} and communicate with local agents via encryption that can't be hacked".

You're enacting legislation that will actually empower those entities this way!

Criminals - surprise surprise - can just break the law, and use devices/software that just.. does not do content scanning, and uses true E2E encryption. Even over insecure channel by using steganography and key exchange over it.

Espionage can be handled the same way, probably even easier as they can easily use one-time pads and key phrases established beforehand in their country of origin!

Meanwhile only group affected by it are just normal citizens.

I keep seeing this fallacy argument about some bad actors and criminals etc. etc. Every government have structures and laws to prevent such activities, in absolutely no shape or form it does not need to read every single message of it citizens. I don't understand how someone can be apologetic for totalitarian state.

Organized criminals (especially state actors) will find ways to communicate in the dark regardless, including just continuing to use illegal encryption.