I really like your comment and agree with your position. Thanks for taking the time to write it out like that.

I do have two questions

The Open Rights Group need our cash though, they are likely to attempt to defeat this in court.

Do you happen to have a link or where does one go to support this specifically?

The trouble is of course that prior to E2EE the government tapped things willy-nilly. And that tool is no longer available to them.

In most all IT positions, both public and industry, we rely heavily on E2EE for everyday operations. Alone data privacy compliance is even made possible (see GDPR). Does this mean governments will have to provide the extensive resources to be the "data controller for all" with all obligations to be compliant with the rule of law? Considering the vast majority of affected users data is not going to be criminal activity.

And of course the security implications of punching holes in a security barrier - What are your thoughts on potential misuse of these backdoors by bad actors?

Open source projects in particular will not accept back doors.

No, but you gotta remember that a lot of people are just going to use a commercial service.

I remember when the US government made a collossal amount of noise over PGP being available to other countries. While PGP is available, few people actually use it, because it's a pain to use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann

After a report from RSA Security, who were in a licensing dispute with regard to the use of the RSA algorithm in PGP, the United States Customs Service started a criminal investigation of Zimmermann, for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act.[5] The United States Government had long regarded cryptographic software as a munition, and thus subject to arms trafficking export controls. At that time, PGP was considered to be impermissible ("high-strength") for export from the United States. The maximum strength allowed for legal export has since been raised and now allows PGP to be exported. The investigation lasted three years, but was finally dropped without filing charges after MIT Press published the source code of PGP.[6]

In 1995, Zimmermann published the book PGP Source Code and Internals as a way to bypass limitations on exporting digital code. Zimmermann's introduction says the book contains "all of the C source code to a software package called PGP" and that the unusual publication in book form of the complete source code for a computer program was a direct response to the U.S. government's criminal investigation of Zimmermann for violations of U.S. export restrictions as a result of the international spread of PGP's use.[7]

There is a difference between "there is software that permits for privacy" and "privacy is generally available to and used by the public". The former is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the latter.

Do you have a license to possess those prime numbers?

Margaret Thatcher's grave is a very lovely public urinal. That's one good thing.

The great British Firewall.

If there's a good thing about this government it is that while they're one of the most incompetent cabinet office we have ever had, that incompetence also applies to their cliche villain laws. I try not to be too hopeful but I wish in the next GE we get a decent gov that can focus on the right things and not bigotry.

As Apple, Signal, Element etc have stated. The hilarious thing is most of our politicians use WhatsApp. Why that's allowed I'll never understand but, given the fact this bill is even still around, I'm assuming the level of security/tech literacy at the home office is pretty fucking low.

forcing messaging services to integrate backdoors, thereby undermining end-to-end encryption._

Wouldn't this only apply to messaging apps that do the encryption for you? I'm curious how this could be applied to something like PGP/GPG or SHA256.