'Real people' don't care about encryption, says UK home secretary

The proclivity of politicians to marginalize expertise, in general, as meaningless and elitist is short-sighted (at best). The world is complicated and the complexity grows by the day. Curation of knowledge and having delegated trust on complex matters is essential to governing our civilization by consent.

If we reach a point where consensus is essentially impossible because a strong majority of people are no longer willing to delegate understanding of complex things they have no interest in then how is it still possible to govern via consent? At that point, we will have to revert to monarchy and/or authoritarianism to break the persistent stalemates of popular consensus. The right-wing of western democracies are playing with fire and they're either too stupid or too greedy to realize where this strategy will end up.

Unless you're going to mock it in your article, then stop giving this lady a platform for her nonsense.

People care about private conversations. We all do, even if we have "nothing to hide". Nobody wants even their "innocent" conversations to be exposed in public or to find out others have read them, and they'd be pissed off if they discovered that someone else was reading their private conversations with another person.

Anyways, the bottom line is that to get those private conversations you need encryption, because clearly governments of the world don't care enough about the laws to simply restrain themselves from collecting everyone's conversations in bulk and analyzing them.