There have been a few interesting cases of "custom" encrypted solutions being sold to crime groups then compromised by law enforcement.

The thing is, most "normal" crime doesn't rely on comms at all - street and domestic violence, burglary, car theft, etc. Fencing stolen items probably could make use of it. It's only really organized crime. And the UK has an increasing problem with organized crime .. from the top, like the unlawful "fast lane" procurement scheme. And the recent business with MI5 identifying an (extremely overt) Chinese agent.

And a surprising amount of terrorist recruitment gets done in the open. As long as you're not planning specific acts it looks like "free speech".

Even the customers on the darkweb have to encrypt all of their orders with PGP or they won't be accepted. Encryption is definitely used by smaller-time black market operations.

You are quite right, normal and “pretty” criminals will just use whatever and not care about encryption. Not only because they won’t necessarily be educated about it, but it will have no impact on their ability to operate.

The police and intelligences agencies aren’t intercepting the communications of normal and petty criminals. It’s organised crime and terrorism that matters, they will obviously continue to use it anyway.

> The police and intelligences agencies aren’t intercepting the communications of normal and petty criminals.

Snowden showed otherwise - they're spying on everyone's conversations, criminal or not.

If they did have that capability do you think they would use it to take down and prosecute a small time drug dealer exposing what they are doing? Even exposing this capability to the Police by give them “secret” intelligence would inevitably result in the knowledge of their capabilities leaking.

If they do have this capability it is only every going to be used for large scale organised crime, terrorism and state security.

They do have this capacity. Given that the existence of this capacity is now public, it is my belief the UK is mainly limited by a combination of selective enforcement, lack of courts and lack of police (weirdly, given their preferred “tough on crime” rhetoric, U.K. courts and police are severely underfunded right now).

For the "skeptics", etc — plenty of article sources and other jump-off points here, for those that want them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...

It's possible that they like surveillance because it is cheaper than traditional methods.

They might like the cost savings for evidence gathering, but there’s something ridiculous like a half million backlog of court cases in the U.K. right now so the rest of the justice system isn’t in a position to use that evidence.

Well, I don't know about phone conversations, but every Tom, Dick and Harry gets access to web surfing history. Given that highly casual attitude - formalised into law! - I wouldn't put it past them to informally do whatever they like with the rest of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#...

> If they do have this capability it is only every going to be used for large scale organised crime, terrorism and state security.

Don’t forget political opposition / dissidents, and analysis to see what they can get away with in terms of public opinion.