Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do they need to understand how encryption works ? They’re mostly interested in the goal ( a lock that can be broken by law enforcement, and allow wiretapping), and will tell you that these things are already possible in the physical world today. In other words they’re fine with intruding upon citizens privacy - this doesn’t require any understanding of encryption I think ( and if encryption prevents that, their a…
This is incorrect. They will quite often claim that it is possible to do without breaking encryption, as required for banking and such. They do believe it is possible to have a backdoor that will _only_ be accessible to the government. Completely ignorant of how quickly that backdoor will be found by hostile state actors.
I’d say that the problem isn’t so much related to encryption, but to the fact that anything digital can be industrialized very quickly, and that the ‘if it goes wrong’ scenario can go really wrong if ( and when) your backdoor falls into the wrong hands.
From a lawmaker’s perspective, it’s just a different kind of risk, which they may or may not be assessing properly. In some ways I see it as closer to people misunderstanding how easy and how bad it is to lose large amounts of data : it’s not related to the inner workings of computers , but rather to the leverage that computers provide. The same is true with weak crypto : everything is great until suddenly everything is in the clear all at the same time, and read by people you don’t want.