If criminals were actually super advanced and air tight, you would not need to worry about backdooring chat apps. They just wouldn’t use them. But since criminals tend to be flawed humans, there is a lot of room to find other avenues. Just like in real life, where cases are routinely solved even though we can’t actually hear every private conversation that occurred behind closed doors.
I do understand that E2EE chat is more powerful than conversation behind closed doors, but so is government dragnets, 0day exploit kits, etc. Ironically, extracting digital communications off of devices has actually become a cornerstone of court cases, even when encrypted chat is used.
As I did mention: I think it's good to consider all options, including this one, just move past it if it turns out that it's not a good solution. I think it would be great if the minister organized a panel of experts to find ways to combat these issues instead of insisting on his bad idea that even his own justice department disagrees with.
I vote for parties that suggest changes to how our police is structured, I believe that will be much more effective at increasing their capacity and ability to most importantly prevent crimes and otherwise investigate and prosecute.
To conclude, I think we fully agree; the focus should be on actual solutions, so let's get past this bad idea and let experts focus on solving the actual problems instead of fighting this bad idea.
Just because someone has a ridiculous idea, doesn’t always mean “experts should just propose a better alternative”. It may as well mean that the whole goal is flawed.
Netherlands government is payed $71 billion every year by the people to serve them. That's quite enough to pay the best security experts and software engineer in the world to increase digital security of the country, and still have plenty of money left to do everything else.