I strongly disagree. It will lead to criminals having their own app to communicate while rest of normal commercial communications will be broken with potential of criminals stealing stuff left and right. All it will take is for some big politician to lose all their money in a heist for these useless attempts to forever disappear.
I actually root for this to happen as fast as possible so all these attempts to go away forever already so that law enforcing agencies go do their actual job.
The fix for that will be to make using those levels of encryption illegal and to put you under suspicion for criminal activity (suspicion of terrorism, for instance) in addition to the criminal activity of using that type of encryption in the first place.
Yes, routing mechanisms, etc exist to make it harder to find out who is using the encryption but the law enforcement power could then also be extended to take down anyone participating in such a network as well as setting up honeypots that somehow get around entrapment laws.
Criminals, almost by definition, are good at doing things without law enforcement catching on. It's possible to try to crack down on this stuff, but like anything else they'll only catch the less competent people.
Catching the less competent people isn’t a bad thing, though. Someone who is competent enough to commit crimes and get away with it is also competent enough to get a well-paid job and choose to live a pro-social life, without the risk of one slip-up sending them to prison.
I suspect that as usual, congressmen will grant themselves exceptions. I absolutely agree that banning or attempting to control encryption will not prevent the bad guys from using it, and will only prevent law-abiding citizens using it to protect themselves and their data.
I actually root for this to happen as fast as possible so all these attempts to go away forever already so that law enforcing agencies go do their actual job.
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