> Privacy and encryption is important for democracy, we say, because it's important that people be able to coordinate in order to resist an increasingly totalitarian government.
Also, too much privacy can also support defection rather than coordination. The government may look at this and see something else: that in the arguably much more likely scenario criminals will use encryption to defect against the social order. Enough untraceable trade and then when there's a nuclear or biological attack you may think about reconsidering just how much privacy do you want general population to have.
I don't want to defend or support the surveillance state here, just pointing out that, especially from government's point of view, them turning totalitarian seems much less likely than criminals and terrorists doing their crime and terror things.
Law enforcement doesn't have any issues with their understanding or their clarity of thinking, but frankly I think people like us on tech forums often do.
Remember: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. The difference between "terrorist" and "dissident" is mostly nuanced definition, depending very much on whether the observer supports the people at question or doesn't. People trying to overthrow the Chinese government are 'dissidents' unless you're a member of the Chinese government, in which case they're terrorists. The fighters in eastern Ukraine are either pro-Russian rebels or anti-Ukrainian terrorists, again depending on who is talking. Islamic mullah's are either exercising their inalienable right to freedom of speech, or spreading extremism and brainwashing people ... probably depending on whether you grew up in the USA or the UK.
It's for these sorts of reasons that the UN has never been able to arrive at a working definition of terrorism.
So now look at the arguments deployed by the technical community for strong encryption. Privacy and encryption is important for democracy, we say, because it's important that people be able to coordinate in order to resist an increasingly totalitarian government. It is easy to find encryption products that make this sort of argument.
In short, the tech community argues that strong government-proof crypto is important because dissidents must be protected (who else is both sympathetic and needs the ability for their communication to have court-order-proof levels of privacy?). But those same governments hear these arguments and say, wait, the dissidents we're dealing with are not dissidents, they're terrorists!
So this is an unresolvable conflict of views. The tech industry will unfortunately always be in the position of explicitly supporting terrorism, from at least some observers point of view. It's inherent in the idea that sometimes governments must not be all powerful.