If there's one thing that stops criminals and terrorists, it's making the things they do illegal!
But what about dumb criminals? From what I read both the London Bridge attackers and Manchester bomber are dumb as dogs__t. They'd probably use whatsapp even if it wasn't private simply because it's popular.
(I support private communication, and think not being able to catch some criminals is a reasonable price, but many others do not)
As is, many government agencies databases seem to be filled to the brim with false-positives, making it impossible to spot the actual dangerous people among the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of "suspects".
Maybe they believe that more data will make it easier to figure out who the really dangerous people are? But that whole idea is still based on concepts which pretty much boil down to precognition of how individual humans gonna act, an impossibility.
Guess a few people took Minority Report a tad bit too seriously and didn't get the message at all.
The reason you make it illegal is that then you can, with Rule of Law, take action against it.
You're (extremely naively) correct in saying making Terrorism (and associated activities) illegal is likely to have little direct effect, but if it isn't illegal then authorities subservient to the Rule of Law are impotent to act against it.
Assuming your comment is not that naive, what's the purpose of the comment? Unless you're advocating return to feudalism I can't see anything positive in your thinking here.
What am I missing?
You're right to contend that simply adding more laws doesn't help further in general. But that's a considerable climbdown from the position implicit in your post upthread.
The jaded tone is likely due to laws being created for the 'drug war' and 'terrorism' quickly impacting ordinary citizens, while having relatively little effect on the groups they were purportedly created for.