[fineman]

Not really, because the proposals aren't to go to no encryption but to go to government-backdoored encryption. To an observer you've still just a random stream of bits until someone tries to decrypt it with the backdoor key. Pretty easy to hide in unless we're monitoring every message.

And terrorists would be smart - they'd employ non-backdoored encryption, hide that in "legit" communications, and encrypt that with the proper back-doored government encryption. They'd appear to be a totally normal snapchat user, or whatever.

If we actually meant to give up all encryption, card-kiddies would destroy civilization in three weeks.

[c22]

And when the next Snowden publishes the global decryption keys we'll all just update our software together.

[tripzilch]

Surely you mean "the next Impact Team" (those behind the Ashley-Madison breaches) because Snowden actually went through painstaking lengths to not reveal stuff that would put the public at danger like that.