Police are today facing an unprecedented situation: tech-savvy criminals are able to lock up evidence such that it can never be obtained even with a warrant. I mean sure you can compel the criminal to unlock the device, but it might be logical for the criminal to refuse if the consequences of being in contempt of court are less than the consequences of revealing what would be found if they unlocked their stuff.

By that logic, some police argue that mandating back-doors or limiting crypto represents an attempt to reclaim lost ground and return to historical baseline rather than a new encroachment. Cops, they argue, have always been able to search or wiretap with a court order.

While I am very much against backdoors and such (for multiple reasons), I also do recognize that we are in historically uncharted waters here and that these waters do need to be navigated. I am not completely unsympathetic to the arguments above.

I'm just not naive enough to believe that we don't need police protection. There are very, very bad people in the world, like organized criminals that steal peoples' pension funds and con elderly people out of their life's savings, murderers and terrorists, people who traffick in child abuse porn, etc. For the state not to seek to stop those kinds of activities would be for them to derelict on their half of the social contract that allows them to be paid (through taxes). In a sense when people like the FBI director clamor for more surveillance rights, from their point of view they are doing their job. Also keep in mind that folks like that are biased-- from their perspective they see nothing but terrible crimes that they feel powerless to prevent. Cops see nothing but the worst in humanity; nobody calls the police when everything's great.

I think the only feasible answer is for police to themselves get far more tech-savvy and learn how to -- when legally appropriate -- target criminals using the same tactics that black hat hackers use. I actually see things like the big Tor pedophile hack as examples of how police should be responding to the increasing technical difficulty of police work. The fact is that no crypto is perfect and there are many tactics that can side-step crypto: social engineering, malware, phishing, etc. It might also be possible with a court order to "black bag" someone's stuff and physically compromise the device and steal the keys, etc. With proper legal authorization I think this is sometimes appropriate, such as if you have clear cause to believe someone to be a member of organized crime, etc.

Of course such things have to be subject to some legal oversight. We need police to protect us from criminals, but we also need laws and regulations to prevent police from becoming criminals or becoming so overzealous that they trample all over peoples' rights. Looking elsewhere in the world we can see that this is a very real danger. There are many countries where official crime and corruption is normal.