most commercial software is riddled with security weaknesses anyway – there is insufficient resources to test everything and time to market often takes priority over anything else. Anyone who thinks this adding further flaws to it benefits anyone (whether it is the govt or the wider safety of citizens) has their brain still set in a mindset from the 1940s to 1980s; and it didn’t even work back then.
You do not hear of this nonsense from Mr Putin or Frau Merkel; and both of them are smart and know about how surveillance operates…
If whatever requires this level of surveillance needs a Court order they authorities involved are going to have to use “boots on the ground” eventually to nick whoever is doing it; rather than just gathering computer data.
Even “cybercriminals” are going to want to convert whatever resources they have stolen into money they can purchase physical items with (such as computer equipment or other gadgets), terrorists will need guns, chemicals for IEDs and other items which would need to be exhibited in Court anyway. Those who are trafficking people or forcing them into sex work need to find the victims and contact them, usually via low tech methods or in such a way (like simply kidnapping them by force) that their relatives notice and all that is required then is normal police and detective work.
When arrrests and searches are carried out; the cops can get physical access to any electronic devices involved in the evidence gathering process – but they (as well as encryption) are merely tools in part of the crime rather than causing the crime itself. it is extremely unlikely a device used by a criminal will be completely absent of evidence showing this use such as unencrypted comms in their local language/dialect – or even “low tech” things like fingerprints, a distinctive housing, stickers on a laptop, or in the case of foreign suspects the device being set for a different language or having an unusual power adaptor due to it being brought in from the suspects home country.
If a politician anywhere in the world were to say that hammers should be made with a setting that made the handle break away if a police officer thought they were being used to knock people on the head rather than legitimate building work they would most likely be retired and sent to a mental health unit to be checked up….
