Ever think there aren't as many pedophiles as you think? Maybe many have their own children to abuse or organizations with trust, like the church, in which encryption doesn't mean anything.

"So if everyone has the right to privacy, how are the police supposed to do their job?"

Somehow the police managed to catch bad guys before mass surveillance existed. Maybe they should look at that?

State of the art encryption has become so widespread and well known that anyone with the tiniest interest in privacy can download one of the hundreds of open source E2EE messaging platforms to use for their criminal activities.

This line of thinking has always struck me as extremely odd - as soon as current, presumably E2EE, methods of communication are tapped into for intelligence and law enforcement purposes, criminals can and will switch to projects that don't comply with the backdoor laws. It's a violation of privacy that only law-abiding citizens will be subject to, for everyone else it's optional.

You might catch a wave of them off guard in the beginning, but in the long term all you end up doing is surveilling innocent people and maybe catching lowest hanging fruit - the types of people who are already dumb enough to share their criminal activities on Facebook.

borrowing from gun reasoning, if encryption is made a crime, then only criminals will use encryption.

That goes way beyond the scope of legislation in question. Suggesting that something akin to the great firewall of china could be deployed in the EU is unrealistic - having said that, it sure feels surreal when expression and support of these authoritarian ideas by EU representatives doesn't lead to immediate political suicide.

Why do you think a Great European Firewall is unrealistic?

It would likely break dozens of individual member state laws protecting freedom of speech, privacy, net neutrality, and the scope of policing powers which would have to be changed or grossly violated. This seems, to me, culturally and politically untenable on a national level because the population at large hasn't been condition to accept iron fist authoritarian rule and gross violations of their personal liberties.

First, I was being sarcastic. But in terms of "political suicide", remember that politicians a) have info we don't, b) have fear mongering elements screaming in their ears, and c) have surveillance lobbyists taking them out to dinner.

Actual criminals don’t only communicate with just other criminals. They actually have to get out and do crime… So police can catch them the way they always did, when things were organised by talking together in private when nobody else could listen to them.