The government's story has been "we need a way to access people's data so we can catch pedophiles, drug dealers and terrorists" and it seems there is a widely held belief that in order to do this, they would need to either ban encryption or weaken it sufficiently to make it effectively useless. However, as far as I can tell, backdoors into your phone or your desktop PC already exist. All the government has to do is convince Apple, Google, MS or Ubuntu to provide an 'official' update to a target computer, wait for the user to accept (or the OS to accept it automatically) and they have full reign over your device.<p>Many people say that opening our devices to a special chosen set of good guys is equivalent to opening them to all the bad guys as well. If that's the case, surely we're already vulnerable given most commonly used devices update automatically?<p>The only purpose I can see for attacking encryption in general is to enable mass surveillance. The government have in fact not been specific about what they are actually asking for, but if they want selective ability to search digital devices, they already have it. If they want further powers, then we need to ask them what they need them for.