Western democratic countries use this for unscrupulous purposes too, just look at the many documented instances in the USA for example.
Anyway the end result is everything will be encrypted. The real battle is forcing ISPs and governments to not log device locations and giving real teeth to it. Something that is fairly doubtful.
I think the US is really a special case here. Also: We never deployed this LI solution in the US.
You're right - because of Google's efforts nowadays everything is going to be encrypted when it comes to web traffic. That's both good and bad.
This was about a decade ago. Not sure if it's still being used, but I think it may be, at least in one country.
Obviously, what I worried about was: The same technical solution could then be sold by less scrupulous sales people to less democratic countries and then misused badly.
I made sure there were a number of undocumented steps involved in setting up LI that couldn't be done without involving me or one trusted developer directly.
It was also purposefully architected to handle a scale of wiretapping of about 1 in 10000 people nationwide.
That 1:10000 ratio was the the ratio I got "off-the-record" from someone in the first western customer country. I was okay with that ratio, given that the country was democratic.
To clarify: I took pains to make sure that the mechanism could only be used to extract a fraction of the traffic flowing through our hardware, and that the selectors had to be preselected in a pretty meticulous way.
Basically I spent a bunch of time to make sure to deliver the exact minimum of that what the country's government requested. There was never any pushback. I think our counterpart in this case was legimitely just trying to solve crime, as opposed to performing passive mass surveillance/recording.
My main point here is that LI can make sense, if it is done done at small scale. Manual work needs to be involved. It needs to be a little cumbersome.