That would be Hollywood terrorists, or media channel terrorists. Real terrorists are organized and will use whatever they need to further their goals. It's also known that terrorist groups are recruiting lots of engineers.
Moreover, organized crime groups, which in real life are much more serious problem, are quite adept with advanced technology. They set up their own radio communications networks and use aerial and submersible drones.
> Moreover, organized crime, which in real life is much more serious problem
Well, sure, in that terrorist organizations are, by definition, a subset of organized crime, so that the problem they pose must be strictly less than that of organized crime more generally.
Technically yes, but in practice people (and media) usually consider them as a separate group from organizations like mafias and drug cartels. I think treating terrorism as something "special" and therefore "more evil" is very harmful.
...get elected as politicians or use their cash for more productive uses such as regulatory capture.
> Moreover, organized crime...
...simply used their captured politicians to make their activities legal. Why use cloak-and-dagger tricks when it is cheaper and easier buy the organizations that get in your way?
Mayby I should have written "real-life amateur terrorists / organized crime". Crime professionals don't use drones for smuggling, they use them for enforcement.
Here in Germany, we have banking trojans wehich are able to thwart two factor authentication by SMS. This requires considerable skill in synchronizing between the hacked computer and the hacked smart phone. I am pretty sure these guys can come up with decent encryption implementations if these are not available as open source any more. And the latter is pretty unlikely. In the 90's all but the US people had strong encryption after all. Open source projects working on crypto where just moving off-shore.
A ban of end-to-end encryption will need to be enforceable. What will LEO do, if I come up with it? Bust my house? That's unthinkable in Europe. Enforceability also means that all communcations must go unencrypted. This merely would kill all online commercial activity.
It would make it much easier to avoid DRM, and to cheat in online games for sure. I'm guessing online gambling would be out the window. Also, I don't know if I would want to do any banking online.
Well that can "easily" be solved by giving you a private key to use for your banking and e-com usage. Then "they" can decrypt it with ease and you stay "safe".
There is no need to sell anything. Even if suddenly the entire world banned crypto at the same time, they'll be plenty of mirrored OS projects floating around the torrent networks.
There's always a need for special purpose cryptosystems. Something that simplifies key management (e.g., for banks) will always be valuable, and it probably won't be sitting around on some random dude's hard drive.
