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And if they do that, do you think it will affect what criminals do?

Yes. Because it will decrease the legitimate traffic online that is encrypted, which makes it easier to pick out encrypted channels from the noise. A few listeners at key nodes in the country's communications network to flag encrypted signals for investigation or simple disruption and you're G2G.

It's the "If you ban guns, only criminals will have guns" theory, except the other side of that coin is "It's real easy to see who the criminals are if guns are banned: they're the folks carrying guns."

How do you filter encrypted channels from the noise? For example, say the criminals now communicate by having a browser extension write e2ee encrypted todo items on a shared todo list app.

And then they will just post SPAM messages at a defunct Usenet group as a some of internal code to share illegal stuff as nothing.

I don't have enough context, why are they trying to ban encryption in the first place?

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