By banning real encryption, the police can arrest anyone using chat apps they can't control. Them not being able to spy on you automatically makes you guilty.

Also something something children something terrorism something something safety, whatever makes the uninformed public feel like this is something that'll benefit them.

It is not about "the criminals", it is about control. They want you to self-censor "wrongthink" in any space.

The rise of totalitairianism in the EU is very real.

Crowd control, psyops, trend analysis. EU is quickly becoming authoritarian and the change is instigated by the sitting parties.

When real encryption is illegal, it will be easier to roll them up.

> Why are some of these people so obsessed with reading everyone's chats?

Having worked with some of the people in law enforcement heavily pushing this, it generally does come from child safety concerns and the overwhelming amount of CSAM sent via encrypted means.

Personally, I don't believe that it will ever be restricted to serious crimes and the potential for abuse is infinite, so I don't believe it is justifiable, but child sexual abuse is a real and enormous problem that causes untold harm and suffering, so we have to find a balance.

The steel-man case could be:

> This will catch the x% of lone wolf terrorists who are too mentally unwell to use encryption and too unwell to hide their intentions.

> Without this, the relative increase in terrorism will cause strongmen to get elected who will just enact even more severe surveillance, among many other bad things.

> So it's not a choice between surveillance and no surveillance. It's a choice between relative levels of badness.

> This will also catch real criminals by listening to their close family members who have worse OPSEC than the criminals.

Easy - you can scan and ban political dissent. This is the only reason the scumbags are pushing it hard.

I wonder if anyone believes those measure are actually against childporn.

Because total surveillance increases the power of the state which can then use it to suppress threats to its power, including effective political dissent. It's not new. It happens everytime if you follow history but people have been conditioned to think skepticism, unless is against "trump bad", is absolutely a conspiracy theory.

The important thing also is that this total massive invasion of privacy won't be for all. You don't get gov transparency but the opposite. The asymmetry of information only increases that power to oppress.

It really depends on the "use case." Regulators are primarily concerned about grooming, which involves criminals using apps that teenagers frequent.

Also, criminals usually have poor operational security—far from perfect. The seriousness of the offense isn't related to the quality of their opsec.

Regulators and law enforcement are generally rational. They may be short-sighted, but they often have reasonable explanations for things you might dismiss as stupid.

That sucks, CSAM sucks, emotional regulation sucks, and as a society, we don't know how to manage allowing kids online. In fact we don't even know, what we'd like. From a political/policy standpoint, that's the challenge of the next 20 years.