[wraptile]

I'm unconvinced that secure communications is the bottle neck when it comes to criminal prosecution. We can expand police power without sacrificing our communications like that.

Anecdotally, take a look at China where privacy doesn't exist and yet Chinese syndicates are responsible for a major chunk of the issues you've listed. So clearly lack of privacy doesn't even correlate with decreased criminal behavior.

[wildzzz]

Probably because any successful Chinese crime syndicate has the backing of both the government and big business.

[wraptile]

Which happens due to totalitarian control of CCP which prohibits self correction mechanisms we have in democratic societies, so what's the Goldilocks area of authoritarianism here? My bet is that compromising all secure communications is all the way in the big bears bed, if we're sticking to the Goldilocks analogy. It's just a fundamental dead-end without fantasy scenarios like benevolent dictatorship which we all know doesn't exist in the real world.