First, the constituents on the chamber are supposed to vote along the party lines. Yes, they do not understand what is going on but that does not obviate their responsibility. Negligence can be criminal. I am specifically talking about the people pushing this (as in planning, writing, orchestrating its ascent to become law and then enforcing).

Why do they need to understand how encryption works ? They’re mostly interested in the goal ( a lock that can be broken by law enforcement, and allow wiretapping), and will tell you that these things are already possible in the physical world today.

In other words they’re fine with intruding upon citizens privacy - this doesn’t require any understanding of encryption I think ( and if encryption prevents that, their answer would be ‘ban encryption’)

This is incorrect. They will quite often claim that it is possible to do without breaking encryption, as required for banking and such. They do believe it is possible to have a backdoor that will _only_ be accessible to the government. Completely ignorant of how quickly that backdoor will be found by hostile state actors.

Well, hostile state actors can ( and do!) already wiretap lots of things in the physical world, in theory wiretapping / surveillance is only possible for governments etc. And the NSA semi-successfully inserted a backdoor through carefully chosen elliptic curves a few years ago ( DUAL_EC_DRBG ) by convincing folks to use a weak PRNG.

I’d say that the problem isn’t so much related to encryption, but to the fact that anything digital can be industrialized very quickly, and that the ‘if it goes wrong’ scenario can go really wrong if ( and when) your backdoor falls into the wrong hands.

From a lawmaker’s perspective, it’s just a different kind of risk, which they may or may not be assessing properly. In some ways I see it as closer to people misunderstanding how easy and how bad it is to lose large amounts of data : it’s not related to the inner workings of computers , but rather to the leverage that computers provide. The same is true with weak crypto : everything is great until suddenly everything is in the clear all at the same time, and read by people you don’t want.

The article clearly states that it was pushed by the Interior Ministry. Those in there know exactly what they are doing.

On the other hand, the interior minister himself has no clue, as well as all the politicians in the assemblée. This is where the double-bluff is from. (granted, I think Darmanain was an exception)

We have to remember that, while the minister changes with the government and thus is by definition a politician (seriously, look at some of our ministries, they go from education to health taking a trip by ecology with a pit stop in finance), the ministries themselves are made of people that mostly stay in place and are not affected by government changes. Those are the ones making the calls. And those precisely know what they're doing (thing DGSI and DGSE).

> Those are the ones making the calls.

No, the career specialists in the ministries are the ones writing the reports and developing options. Ministers, in France and other democracies, bring their own staffs of experts. Those will work out a recommendation. The minister -- or more broadly speaking the politician -- makes the call.

And frankly, I don't know of another way. Nobody can be an expert on all the things that come up in a single ministry, let alone the parliament.

On paper. But it is easier to get influenced by intelligent "Subject Matter Experts" and they usually know how to nudge the public representatives their way.

This is a known and accepted flaw of rotating leadership in democracies.

The question is who is feeding them that information.

No, it is theatre. They are masters of their craft. They are pushing an agenda to convince the public. They pose as ignorant and relatable, so that the ignorant and relatable keep voting for them.