The police have the right with suitable warrant to break a lock and breach a wall if necessary
The question isn't if you can get at conversation between two law abiding people or two pedophiles - in both cases you can if you through sufficient resources at it. The question is - what's sufficient?
My concern is that if you connive to make it a trivial amount of effort the temptation for Government will be to listen in on every conversation to lessen the chance of missing an important one. Further the more trivial you make it for the Government the better the chance that the not-Government will be able to listen in on any as well.
If on the other hand the effort is non-trivial then the Government will need to carefully consider where to put it's effort. Obviously there's a greater chance that the effort will be misapplied and the two pedophiles will have the freedom to plot or whatever but that tends to worry me less.
Note I'm an American. People run around shooting each other regularly here and I still don't think telling people they can't own a gun is a good idea so I'd take what I say with a grain of salt.
The problem with all of the above is that it takes human effort, which is costly.
We've all seen the Pandoras Box that the likes of Google and Facebook have opened on automated behavioural decision making. Police want that, their quotas and their budgets neeeeeeeeeeeed iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttt like Renton needs that one last hit.
Outsource our decisions to 'the infallible machine' so that we can answer "computer says no". No culpability, no responsibility, even less need to apply our x million-years-in-the-making built-in logic engines that once (maybe?) were directed and trained in how to be applied to the job of policing in order to better serve the public.
Policing is meant to be difficult, because getting it wrong has great potential to completely fuck people's lives.
If they can't "prove it" without access to the last morsel of individual privacy afforded by E2EE, then it's likely there's nothing to prove.
Earn it you lazy fucks.
Edited to add: A little bit of retrospective guilt in the offensively opinionated ending above, but I'm going to make it a bit worse and spread it a bit wider. It's politicians calling for this because it seems to "play in the electorate". So "earn it you lazy fucks" is directed at all the lazy fucks in the chain from ideas man to lobbyist to number-cruncher to adviser to political mouthpiece to sponsor of legislation to partisan supporters of the bill and even to the somewhat victims as the enforcers of bad legislation. An entire chain in which none of whom seem to have an understanding of the context of what they're promoting outside of "how it plays" or "this says you're doing illegal". Fuck them all out of an airlock.
These awful new laws make it invisible and routine for the government to break down the door to your digital home.
This is the real problem. This introduces a global vulnerability that isn't analogous to anything physical, like breaking down walls. There are almost 50,000 judges in the USA alone. Breaking into any one of their offices or houses, or bribing them, could grant you access to every phone or computer on the planet. A local magistrate doesn't have the authority to issue a warrant to break down every door in the USA, nor would the local police be able to execute such an order even if it could be issued. There are matters of scale here that are novel.
The problem is partly that end users have no way of knowing when their communication has been decrypted. I know if the cops kicked my door in, I don't know if they're watching my messages with or without a warrant.
If there were locks or walls that are entirely impenetrable, would people be disallowed to possess or use them?
I probably wouldn't like it, but it seems less crazy than some people make it out to be.
In practice the analogy doesn't hold up of course, since it's costly and noticeable for cops to raid a house but cheap and easy for the government to spy on everyone (and we know how eager they are to do it).
There are millions of "impenetrable locks" in our society -- things you can do that might give the government less than 100% control over you. You could put your money in crypto where it can never be seized, should crypto be illegal? You could bury your money in a forest where it can never be seized, should shovels be illegal? You can stab somebody with a knife, should knives be illegal? You could fly to a foreign country, should flights be illegal? You could discuss a crime in-person not over the internet, should private conversations be illegal?
The fact is, unless you want a totalitarian state, the agreement is that society functions without perfect control by government, and most of us prefer to live in such regimes. In fact, most of us recognize that regimes that want more and more power over the individual usually end up misusing it.
THe easy boogey-monster is child-porn, but that's bull done by a tiny fraction of the population. The real monster is authoritarian governments, which are the majority of governments in the world.
Well...
> You could bury your money in a forest where it can never be seized, should shovels be illegal?
Or forests or remote places... obviously not.
> You can stab somebody with a knife, should knives be illegal?
OK, but guns or automatic guns makes this much easily reproducible at scale. And guns are indeed heavily regulated everywhere in the world (well, yeah, there is ONE exception...)
> You could fly to a foreign country, should flights be illegal?
You need a valid passport, pass several checks and you might be on some list and blocked from taking the plane (obviously there are way to hack that, that's not the point). Or denied access to the other country.
> You could discuss a crime in-person not over the internet, should private conversations be illegal?
No, but police can still spy you if they have reasonable (or not...) reasons to do so.
My point is: while I'm not OK with banning encryption or adding some backdoor to it, we cannot deny that the "at scale" differences are important enough to at least have an adult discussion about how the issue should be tackled. Dismissing it like many people in the tech world do is as naive as willing to ban it.
We live in the golden age of surveillance. If the authorities want to know where you are, what you buy, who you speak to, what you like, and where you've been, they can get that information. The only thing they cannot do is peek into a conversation if you don't want them to know the contents of your thoughts.
You suggest that perhaps they should be able to do more. This is because you have never lived under a ruthless autocracy, yet.
What? Maybe you're like 20+ years younger than me, because I feel like this boogeyman has been presented for 20 years and routinely shut-down as a bad-faith argument for 20 consecutive years. Maybe without that context it could look like it's never been considered, but it has, and it's been rejected.
The basic summary is this -- You weigh all the positive side-effects of breaking encryption vs all the negative ones and you do the math. And the math is that most governments already are corrupt and take too much power over their citizens and abuse it, and of all the problems in the world child porn and even terrorism are lower on the list than people slipping in the bathtub and it's all FUD.
If there's ANYWHERE we need to trade away privacy to for everybody's wellbeing, it's collecting and exposing information on political corruption, finances, and tax evasion (see US supreme court justices). It's so funny how the people in power forget to mention that auditing of their own behavior could be so valuable... odd...
You can also bust the terrorists and child pornographers without breaking everyone else's encryption.
Get a warrant, break into their homes and install a keylogger and snarf all their passwords and break into all their accounts if you have to.
And that's assuming they aren't just stupid and talking about what they're doing on unencrypted channels, which is usually what happens.
I think you have to look at from a broader viewpoint. The government regulates many things for a variety of reasons (public safety, mitigating negative externalities), and aside from libertarian cranks, I don't see anyone shaking their fists at the government for having seatbelt laws or food regulations or speed limits. It's not "because criminals could drive their getaway cars really fast" that we have speed limits.
(Perhaps that's actually what you're implying... not sure.)
The same goes the other way too though - it's cheap for criminals/terrorists to communicate over e2e encrypted software compared to having to travel to meet physically.
I suppose it depends on how your constitution is written ?
Btw. landlords also may do this under special circumstances, as well as a firemen.
But the default is, that your home is sacred and the doors my not breached. Just as the default for communication should be, that it is private.
If there is a suspect, the police may hack their computers with a warrant, but they may not hack all of our computers(by implementing backdoors), because it is more comfortable for them.