> This is basically what happens when law enforcement uses a search warrant to get access to user data from a tech company.

Which is another reason why consolidating everyone's data into a few centralized locations is also problematic.

> While this process does have weaknesses, it is still the difference between a legal process overseen by the courts and one based on espionage where agents do whatever they want without oversight.

But that's not what we're talking about here. The question isn't whether the police should need to get a warrant, it's whether the government should be able to prohibit technology that preserves privacy because some criminals might use it alongside all the law abiding citizens.

And encryption doesn't "prevent law enforcement from doing their jobs" -- that's just a trope. What it does is make their jobs more expensive. Even if they can't just get a copy of all your communications from a megacorp by filing some papers, they can still get a warrant and then plant bugs or guess your password or plant bugs that allow them to observe you entering your password etc. It's not impossible, it just takes more resources to do it -- which prevents it from happening at a massive scale.

That's a feature, not a bug. It still lets them solve murders, because murders are serious and uncommon and can justify the expense of a real investigation. It may make it inexpedient to spend those resources to catch every last hooker and pothead, but so what? Sometimes it's not worth the candle. If you think it really is, give them more money instead of giving everyone else less privacy. But sometimes it just isn't. Sometimes it costs more to solve a crime than to not solve it.

Meanwhile (this is the feature) it doesn't make it too easy for them to identify all the people in group X and give the list to Joe McCarthy or round them all up and put them in internment camps. Law enforcement should have some friction, because when it happens too fast at too large a scale, history shows this to be Bad.