I've worked on IT problems for a very long time.. coming up on 30 years here soon. In all sorts of contexts, academic, government/miltary, ISPs, ASPs, cloud providers, SaaS entities, traditional IT departments, telcos.. you name it. Ever work at a company that has 64 different billers and no plans to ever consolidate? Ever work on an awesome tool only to have it replaced by index cards because the guy in charge was afraid of computers? Ever build a perfectly capable monitoring/management platform only to have it replaced by an entirely substandard version because yours 'wasn't invented here'? Ever watch as a vendor takes big chunks of a companies money every 3 years because no one remembers the last time said vendor couldn't deliver even though it was only 3 years ago? Ever watch project after project fail because anytime any modicum of project management is applied or development methodology attempted all progress comes to a screeching halt? I have and I can go on endlessly... with examples of IT failures and very rarely, IT's successes. To sum it all up, to me, all forward progress in IT is made by people who actually know what is going on ( both from a technical and from a business/political/social perspective) .. and generally, all hard problems associated with IT are caused by the poseurs and the leeches ( in either domain ). 2 examples of poseurs.. execs that use vendors to do everything for them, including thinking for them .. or the 'X specialist' that refuses to learn the 'Y domain' because of the 'religion/supposed magic/history/tradition around X' .. 2 examples of the leeches.. the person that blocks any attempt to introduce something new or fix lingering issues because they want to protect their job.. or generally 'project managers/scrum masters/etc.' For me, the team/module is too big if you can't run it or extend it with 8-12 people .. beyond that the overhead causes everything to cave in ( not a new concept .. see MMM's surgical team concept from 1976) .. I can go on endlessly. The low point of the poseur/leech problem is this recent love affair people have with 'imposter syndrome'... it's as if the poseurs and leeches are wanting desperately to rationalize their reason for hanging around and have created this sad justification. Let's rather focus on the 'burden of the expert'.. having to constantly claw your way thru all the artifice and detritus stood up by the imposters and instead find a way to clear these folks out, make IT into a real engineering profession, and then finally automate and converge IT away as was promised long ago .. and not have IT itself leech off the system forever with teams re-developing every possible thing over and over again in the next new fad methodology or language. Sorry for the rant.. IT could go on forever. :-)

Stronger encryption without back-doors is letting people and businesses conduct their business safe with the knowledge criminals can't listen to them. Stronger encryption without back-doors is letting governments conduct their clandestine/diplomatic efforts safe with the knowledge other governments or terrorists can't listen to them. Therefore if you apply the DA's logic to these cases.. by removing stronger encryption from the phones.. we should make banking, spying, diplomacy, you name it.. less safe. Guns are letting criminals conduct their business with the knowledge governments may not be able to stop them. Guns are letting governments conduct their business with the knowledge other governments may not be able to stop them. Therefore by this logic.. we should outlaw guns. Hmm.. does law enforcement want to give up their guns? Not likely. I'm a fan of not outlawing 'tools'.. rather 'behavior'.