They don't want new powers, they want their old powers back. When I understood that, I enlightened.
The tools we have made are quite dangerous for this and that's one more reason why we as the techies responsible for the creation of such tools should ensure that this can never ever happen. It's also one the reasons why Phil Zimmermann is one of my personal heroes.
I'm not sure I agree but at least that isn't outright ridiculous like the 18'th century would be.
This knowledge was much leaner when compared to today, but there were less population to begin with, so that knowledge was enough.
Crowded countries like China had its social norms evolved accordingly and differently due to this population density.
Increase in the speed of communication and in overall population allowed greater dissemination in shorter time, that's it. Before, more manual methods worked well enough to get a sniff of these activities, but it doesn't work now. So, governments want their cake back.
CIA did mass surveillance on state level with Crypto AG. Russians bugged whole fleet of diplomatic IBM typewriters. Intelligence agencies listened people via central heating pipes, insiders were planted inside suspected groups... The ways were numerous, and still are. The people, society and technology is evolving. So the game.
I don't support the initiative, but that's the state of the play right now.
This might be backwards when looked from there, but this is how it looks from here.
Nope. E2E communications have buried a lot of stuff proverbially underground. The leaks are reduced. Hence, governments lost the ability to monitor as they liked. There's much more and invisible communication going on when compared to the past, and it's much more detailed and direct. Also its volume has increased exponentially.
So monitoring that stuff got way harder, and they want the easy way back.
Notice the part about where the conspiring here took place and how those conversations were discovered and revealed. Sure two people can communicate over E2E but if you want to start a movement (something that actually would matter rather than just complaining to your bestie), you need to open it up to the public which turns out also opens up the door to people spying on you.
Maybe you're too young to remember a time when no one carried a GPS in their pocket, most payments were done in cash and only banks had CCTV cameras. I'd love to see states and companies take back the "powers" they had back then :)
Intelligence is an old craft. Insiders are old as well. However, speed of life and increase in population coupled with new communication methods invalidate these old methods.
To protect their status quo, governments want their so-called vision back, and then some...
I don't agree. They want both. They want more!