I can’t imagine that a significant number of criminals who are involved in sexual exploitation of children would suddenly be unmasked due to any government imposed rules about encryption. At best you’d have a small wave of folks caught off guard.
The "question” is a false premise. You can’t stop people form using encryption. The people who are strongly motivated to use it to cover their criminal activity (the more heinous the more motivated they’re likely to be) are still going to. The knock-on effect is that you give the police and governments the keys to the kingdom against people who are probably not committing heinous crimes.
The abuse potential increases with little to nothing gained for the rule of law and the common person.
People have been committing crime and hiding them (the key component to not getting caught it turns out) since humans decided to implement laws. Weakening encryption isn’t going to stop that and it’s a hollow argument.
This is repeated often but that doesn't make it any truer. Legislation can make people use ineffective encryption, or prevent the use of it. Remember when SSL certificates had 48 bits effective key length? It was legislation that caused this. People used bad encryption because of the legislation. Remember when PGP was the only end-to-end messaging scheme widely available? Only very few people used it. Its reach was hampered by legislation. (In part; let's not forget bad usability.)
Most people are unaware how the services they use are protecting them from eavesdropping. Sure some are careful and research the failure modes in the security of their communications. And some would go to any length to keep their communications encrypted. But the less mainstream it is, the easier it is for them to fuck it up. Suppose due to legislation no apps in the Google Play store can do reliable end-to-end: Suddenly you have these "privacy conscious" people downloading an App binary from some random site because they heard it was "good". Yeah right we know how that story goes.
By all means, argue that ubiquitous encryption increases security for all of us. And I'm your friend. But don't go claiming that compromising mainstream encryption wouldn't hamper security for the bad guys. Because it absolutely would. Like for the rest of us!
The "question” is a false premise. You can’t stop people form using encryption. The people who are strongly motivated to use it to cover their criminal activity (the more heinous the more motivated they’re likely to be) are still going to. The knock-on effect is that you give the police and governments the keys to the kingdom against people who are probably not committing heinous crimes.
The abuse potential increases with little to nothing gained for the rule of law and the common person.
People have been committing crime and hiding them (the key component to not getting caught it turns out) since humans decided to implement laws. Weakening encryption isn’t going to stop that and it’s a hollow argument.