[asgraham]

It’s partially that for sure, but I think it’s also a kind of “common sense” feeling of the public that if people use technology to commit a crime, there must therefore be a record of that crime and therefore the police should be able to use that record to easily stop technology-crime. See: every police show ever.

That was never possible before. Historically, conversations didn’t leave records, and when they did, they were trivially burned. There was no sense that the police should have access to the records because there were no records.

The technical and ethical problems of this “common sense” are far from obvious to most whose primary exposure to and mode of thinking about policing and technology is what we see on TV.