> Most people that work in politics or intelligence in liberal states aren't in it for the power. They are either curious, desire a life of excitement, or want to bring positive change to society.
I suspect you're correct. However, the systems we design must be strong enough to deal with the inevitable lone wolf or corrupt regime. If we rely on average people with good intentions being the only people in power we will fall to the first outlier to show up. This isn't a matter of pessimism or distrust. It's a matter of us having to be successful at defending every attack, every time and them only having to succeed once. All it takes is one. You design the system not for the authorities you hope to have in power but for the one's you fear having power.
Governments have many tools, the most powerful of which is physical coercion, to gain access to data they have reason to believe exists. I want the serving and execution of a warrant to be expensive (and legible, except in the most rare, unique - and thus highly regulated - circumstances). If it is expensive then it will have to be targeted - resources aren't infinite. Making these powers trivially cheap and unnoticeable when exercised will only lead to widespread abuse and unwarranted violations of privacy as we have seen time and again whenever dragnet surveillance becomes cheap, easy and accepted in a population.
Nation States already have the power to inject silent updates and "hack" foreign agents -- everything they're asking for under these new laws. They generally do not need to break encryption or gain encryption back doors. They do full take on the data before and after it is encrypted and decrypted. This, for the most part, is expensive and thus targeted, for sophisticated intelligence targets. Governments now want to expand this power which has been traditionally reserved for targets which pose grave national security risks. Governments want to apply a military tool to civilian police investigations - effectively militarising police surveillance of all citizens. Are sufficient effective checks and balances even possible for such a powerful capability?
Add to that, the fact that governments want us to pay to create and maintain this surveillance directly, thus hiding the true cost and scope of their investigatory activities - and a means by which we can challenge the implementation of such a system lawfully, by compelling all private companies to build in vulnerabilities on demand. Worse, once those vulnerabilities are in place in a system, all users of that system are vulnerable, not just the targets of an investigation - in effect, making all users, except for just the first one on that platform, cheap and easy targets. Eventually, this facility will be built into every system at design time - it's just another regulatory requirement; and even that barrier, the first target, will be gone.
The fact that they want to use these extremely powerful, hard to detect tools and techniques, developed for covert surveillance against foreign powers who pose a national security risk, against us common citizens should be concerning. The fact that they are attempting to push the burden of creating these tools onto the public, the public against which they will be used, and in so doing, make exercising this power extremely cheap and - beyond the first target on a platform, anywhere - effectively free should be downright terrifying.
Again, it's not about malintent; it's about protecting from the outliers - the abusers - because, while the abuse of a single individual or community can be extremely harmful to that individual or community, widespread abuse of such an investigatory tool is almost entirely impossible to fight. These tools defeat the very means by which people organise resistance against oppression: free, open and private communications.
We should think very carefully lest we put a surveillance ratchet in place that will become very hard to coordinate against by its very nature if abused. Given the history of "exigent powers" becoming normalised introducing such a system seems extremely dangerous.