I don’t mean to be glib, but it’s a common fallacy to expect consistency.

Consistency might happen for a stretch, even a long one, but the first principle is to keep and acquire power.

The people who don’t prioritize power above all don’t hold office long because they lose out to people who do

I suppose I am being glib, but...

This is not a vice reserved for the powerful. Politicians and whatnot certainly do nakedly make a principled argument one and the opposite the next. So does almost everyone. We do it especially when something is at stake, but we'll also do it to win an argument.

It's an irony of human nature. OOH, we're seekers of patterns, principles and consistency. OTOH, we're also highly adept at using these tendencies selectively and disingenuously.

..whether or not we prioritize power.

I agree with you. I wasn’t trying to say only politicians exhibit this behavior, just that they do.

Maybe it’s more pithy to say we shouldn’t expect better of them than we demonstrate ourselves.

Part of me though still things that we should elect those that represent the best of us.

AFAIK, more or less the same as with phones or paper mail: No third party is allowed to listen in, except police and other duly authorized parties, after they have a warrant.

The difference is listening to a phone is easy for the police, while breaking encryption is impossible.

I'd assume the result is intended to be identical to phone safety: abuse will be technically possible but legally criminalized and in practice rare.

Now how this works out in the face of the international internet is a whole other can of worms, of course.

EU is composed of multiple people with multiple, differing goals. It's also to note that things like GDPR only affect peons like corporations or people, not the governments.

It’s not.

The EU doesn't have a particularly strong stance on privacy from law enforcement. Law enforcement organizations are specifically exempt from e.g. GDPR.