Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's even more absurd than that. The premise is that we can have a public worldwide debate that emphasizes how important encryption is to successfully carrying out terrorist attacks, convince the world to give up their privacy for the sake of safety, and after the majority of the protestors have been defeated by public awareness that encryption and terrorism go hand-in-hand, the terrorists will go back to using phone…
My thought is that if we implement a back door policy, the public will have communication links which are much easier to compromise by any party, while terrorists can still easily use encryption and/or steganography to secure their communications. All the back doors accomplish in the end is harming the general public.
It sounds impossible, of course, but that's just because we're not sure where these guys put their goals; some may be fighting for lack of another purpose in their life, while others may be motivated by personal loss or a thorough belief in the violent interpretation of Islam.
So what we really need to do is find a common thread among all the terrorists, and pull on it.