I’m reminded of the hyperbole - which I fell for - around the Regulation of Investigatory Powers act around the turn of the millennium.
It provides a legal mechanism for authorities to require that individuals disclose encryption keys for encrypted data that was legally obtained or intercepted (i.e. with a warrant) by those authorities, and there are penalties (jail time) for refusing to do so.
The worry at the time was that random data is indistinguishable from encrypted content, so there might be times when people are jailed when they don’t even have the keys because there’s no encrypted data - just random bytes! Or, what happens if you lose the keys?
The reality is that there’s a court system that ‘regulates’ all this. No-one is going to be jailed unless the courts find that they are not providing keys they really do have. Of course, in a conspiracy where the authorities and the courts are all colluding, they could jail people pretending that they knew they had the keys - but there are far easier ways for the authorities to do this than some elaborate scheme with fake encrypted data.
At the time I was fully convinced that it was a step down a slippery slope to authoritarianism. Really, it was just bringing the ‘virtual’ world into line with the physical one.
[I suspect there are a few here who were also around at the time and still believe it’s all a nefarious governmental plot - I’d ask them to show where, in the 23 years since it passed, harm - or suspicion of harm - has happened].
Now, maybe this is different. I certainly don’t want end to end encryption to be banned. But there’s a bit of a ‘cried wolf’ happening in my brain.