[kwhat4]

I think the governments all still want strong encryption, but with a man-in-the-middle style eavesdrop point at the tech company where the NSA or whoever can perform their inspection on all the communication flowing through the service. This is certainly not to protect the children but more likely for terrorist monitoring with the added bonus of vacuuming up your dick pics. It should be more secure than back-dooring AES/RSA/ECC, but it still has the potential to compromise quite a bit of information and basically does away with what little privacy any end user has left.

[lostcolony]

Of course they do. They want a mathematically perfect, impossible to crack system, that also happens to have a common key that works for everything, that they alone own. And by 'they', I mean their government. Not enemy governments.

What happens when (not if) that common key leaks or is abused is not their concern. Until, of course, it invariably happens, and they find their citizens having their bank accounts siphoned, their agents being discovered and blackmailed for their basic 'civilian' internet use, etc.

[kwhat4]

There is no common key in the MITM scenario. It's still securely encrypted using over the counter algorithms, but instead of the end users exchanging keys, you exchange with the MITM and different key sets are used by both parties.