Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those privacy-breaching bills are for the safety of the government, not citizens.
Having worked in law enforcement, seeing sentiment like this is just so depressing. On one side it's people saying things like this, while on the other side a large part is complaining about law enforcement not doing enough to combat cyber crime. These things go hand in hand. If criminals can have limitless access to new technologies, but LE gets no new ways of finding criminals using new technologies, we might as we…
Mandated backdoors on the phones sold here - worse security for everyone except the criminals who will import their phones from abroad.
Hackers for hire like NSO group being paid by tax money for dveloping exploits - will be abused by everyone who can pay.
Government developing their own exploits - incredibly expensive and risky.
That all assumes criminals and LE are separate entities but in reality criminals will probably get access to those powers in some capacity, be it trough a breach, rouge employee or a corrupt leadership structure. On top of that, even in EU there are countries like Slovakia that were and after next elections likely will be ruled by parties with close connections to mafia.