Just like for other big challenges like biodiversity and climate change, it feels like it often boils down to the politicians just not understanding enough to take rational decisions. Of course they can't all have a PhD in cryptography, but they should also not have no clue at all.
Over an over again, politicians are asking for backdoors. To me it just proves that they don't understand the very basic of how encryption works.
Especially these days in Europe, it seems completely insane: it is already a problem that most companies use US services, given that the US have become hostile to Europe. The sane way to go is to try to get better privacy for European companies/people, not worse. Adding backdoors just makes it easier for adversaries to access private data.
latexr · 79d ago
> To me it just proves that they don't understand the very basic of how encryption works.
Hanlon’s razor isn’t always true, sometimes it really is malice. Considering EU ministers want to exempt themselves from Chat Control, that suggests to me they do understand enough of the basics.
I love the combination of them naming this evil bill "Child Sexual Abuse Regulation Proposal" to make it sound like an obviously good idea, and them asking to be exempt from it. So are you implying you are abusing children?
ozmodiar · 78d ago
Especially considering that governments such as the UK (I know they left the EU but I'm more familiar with them than the current EU members) have a pretty grim history of exactly that.
moffkalast · 78d ago
Using their own bullshit excuses against them, that might actually cause their heads to explode. Of course the rebuttal will be something something national security yadda yadda.
No comments yet
redeeman · 75d ago
yes, they are obviously to be considered child abusers. thats what I will publicly call ANYONE that supports their own exemption. they are pedos and child abusers, and should them campaigning for their exemption should count as admission of guilt
kgwxd · 78d ago
It’s far more often malice than stupidity, when talking about overreach of power. I absolutely hate Hanlon’s Razor, it’s how we got here.
csomar · 79d ago
> it feels like it often boils down to the politicians just not understanding enough to take rational decisions.
That's a very gullible take and kind of apologetic for the politicians. If you are implementing a backdoor to crypto-systems, you probably know exactly what you are doing.
That, and this has been re-surfacing time and again under different pretenses make this a deliberate attack on freedom of expression. The politicians know exactly what they are doing.
bambax · 79d ago
Listening to the debates in the lower chamber (Assemblée Nationale) and the arguments of those arguing in favor of backdoors clearly show they do not have a clue how any of this works. They are not clever players doing double-bluffs. They are ignorant stooges.
tuetuopay · 79d ago
The article clearly states that it was pushed by the Interior Ministry. Those in there know exactly what they are doing.
On the other hand, the interior minister himself has no clue, as well as all the politicians in the assemblée. This is where the double-bluff is from. (granted, I think Darmanain was an exception)
We have to remember that, while the minister changes with the government and thus is by definition a politician (seriously, look at some of our ministries, they go from education to health taking a trip by ecology with a pit stop in finance), the ministries themselves are made of people that mostly stay in place and are not affected by government changes. Those are the ones making the calls. And those precisely know what they're doing (thing DGSI and DGSE).
Propelloni · 79d ago
> Those are the ones making the calls.
No, the career specialists in the ministries are the ones writing the reports and developing options. Ministers, in France and other democracies, bring their own staffs of experts. Those will work out a recommendation. The minister -- or more broadly speaking the politician -- makes the call.
And frankly, I don't know of another way. Nobody can be an expert on all the things that come up in a single ministry, let alone the parliament.
z3phyr · 78d ago
On paper. But it is easier to get influenced by intelligent "Subject Matter Experts" and they usually know how to nudge the public representatives their way.
This is a known and accepted flaw of rotating leadership in democracies.
Agingcoder · 79d ago
Why do they need to understand how encryption works ? They’re mostly interested in the goal ( a lock that can be broken by law enforcement, and allow wiretapping), and will tell you that these things are already possible in the physical world today.
In other words they’re fine with intruding upon citizens privacy - this doesn’t require any understanding of encryption I think ( and if encryption prevents that, their answer would be ‘ban encryption’)
skummetmaelk · 79d ago
This is incorrect. They will quite often claim that it is possible to do without breaking encryption, as required for banking and such. They do believe it is possible to have a backdoor that will _only_ be accessible to the government. Completely ignorant of how quickly that backdoor will be found by hostile state actors.
Agingcoder · 78d ago
Well, hostile state actors can ( and do!) already wiretap lots of things in the physical world, in theory wiretapping / surveillance is only possible for governments etc. And the NSA semi-successfully inserted a backdoor through carefully chosen elliptic curves a few years ago ( DUAL_EC_DRBG ) by convincing folks to use a weak PRNG.
I’d say that the problem isn’t so much related to encryption, but to the fact that anything digital can be industrialized very quickly, and that the ‘if it goes wrong’ scenario can go really wrong if ( and when) your backdoor falls into the wrong hands.
From a lawmaker’s perspective, it’s just a different kind of risk, which they may or may not be assessing properly. In some ways I see it as closer to people misunderstanding how easy and how bad it is to lose large amounts of data : it’s not related to the inner workings of computers , but rather to the leverage that computers provide. The same is true with weak crypto : everything is great until suddenly everything is in the clear all at the same time, and read by people you don’t want.
csomar · 79d ago
First, the constituents on the chamber are supposed to vote along the party lines. Yes, they do not understand what is going on but that does not obviate their responsibility. Negligence can be criminal. I am specifically talking about the people pushing this (as in planning, writing, orchestrating its ascent to become law and then enforcing).
nelox · 79d ago
No, it is theatre. They are masters of their craft. They are pushing an agenda to convince the public. They pose as ignorant and relatable, so that the ignorant and relatable keep voting for them.
chgs · 79d ago
The question is who is feeding them that information.
Spivak · 79d ago
I'm sure some of them do but encryption is pretty unusual as a lock that police can't break. If a judge orders a search of your house and the incriminating evidence is in a safe they will break it open if you refuse to open it for them. Governments aren't exactly happy that for digital assets there's ready made mass-market systems where the response to any search warrant will be to pound sand.
When law enforcement tells you that they're being hindered by the fact that even unsophisticated criminals have E2EE messaging and that's their biggest source of evidence (pulling text records) then asking for back doors starts to sound reasonable. It isn't of course because it defeats the whole point but it doesn't have to be a crusade against speech or whatever.
pca006132 · 79d ago
The issue is that something like this will not affect the criminals, they can just use something with encryption.
roenxi · 79d ago
> Governments aren't exactly happy that for digital assets there's ready made mass-market systems where the response to any search warrant will be to pound sand.
Which is to say they understand the situation perfectly and are acting with a firm intellectual grasp of what is going on.
The issue isn't that they don't understand encryption, it is that they reject citizens having any sort of power to resist the state. Which is cool and all, authoritarianism is always with us to some extent. But at its core they see this from the viewpoint that the state is fundamentally in control and sometimes it grants people the privilege of privacy because it doesn't think what they are saying is important and therefore they can be humoured. They'll pretend technical ignorance if it gets the liberals off their backs, but the only people they are fooling are the credulous.
palata · 77d ago
> it is that they reject citizens having any sort of power to resist the state
But by doing that, they make it easier for adversaries to spy on their own citizen, which is a national security issue.
That's why it sounds like ignorance to me: I understand that they really want a backdoor just for themselves "because they are the good guys" and "for national security", but they don't understand that if they have a backdoor, then their adversaries will eventually have it, too.
roenxi · 77d ago
It isn't even that complex an idea, you laid it out in 1 sentence. "If they have a backdoor, then their adversaries will eventually have it, too". They understand that just fine. If anything, you're the one who doesn't understand although I'd not push the point because the rules around political debate are weird and you might be humouring them.
The people in government have a hierarchy of threats. Social challenges from within their own nation always higher than those from foreign countries. Most politicians are perfectly happy to sacrifice national security to be able to see what their citizens are saying, they just won't articulate it in plain language because it sounds bad.
We can tell this because they're signing off on narratives around being "the good guys". Anyone pushing that sort of narrative spin isn't a good guy. That isn't how law enforcement works in practice and anyone in high political power knows it if they have even a shred of intellectual honesty; they've seen how the sausage is made and are well aware that the real world is all various shades of what happens when a family breaks down and siblings start fighting with each other.
unification_fan · 78d ago
What I don't understand is this:
Whether they are gullible, corrupt, or simply pieces of shit and sociopaths... Why are they allowed to keep their job? And how can we fix democracy to make sure that they are held accountable?
Let's be clear about one thing: Hanlon's razor is bullshit. Globally, only about ~30% of humans think that "people are generally trustworthy". Even fewer think that "strangers can be trusted". So it fucking IS malice, and people are not trusting because they know that it is malice. In fairness you can look at nord-european countries for some counter-examples, but 30% is a good approximation.
I don't even care if politicians are stupid or malicious. They're probably both anyway because they're human. But what I care about is that they don't fuck with my hard earned civil liberties. So much blood was shed to get where we are... have we learned nothing at all?
regularjack · 79d ago
That is a very cynical take.
throwaway290 · 79d ago
This is the line of Russian propaganda. But don't try to explain by malice if it can be perfectly explained by incompetence.
orbital-decay · 79d ago
Unbelievable. What does Russian propaganda of all damn things has to do with this? Especially considering that the power takeover in Russia happened much in the same way - people assumed the politicians are dumb and naive, which I'm telling you as someone who tried to resist that takeover. Yes, your politicians - all politicians, regardless of the country - would have been happy to have more power over you and need to be kept in check. They are never naive, only you can be naive by assuming that. If you forget this for a second, you're done. This is not some kind of controversial issue all of a sudden, that's basic democracy.
throwaway290 · 78d ago
> What does Russian propaganda of all damn things has to do with this?
They welcome Europeans thinking their government is out to get them
> Especially considering that the power takeover in Russia happened much in the same way - people assumed the politicians are dumb and naive
People in Russia did the opposite of that. People in Russia were conditioned by decades of violent dictatorship and were either afraid to make a noise or actively wanted the strongman fascist rule. And the guy in power is actual ex KGB. There's a difference
> your politicians
Putin?
> need to be kept in check.
Keeping in check != assuming the worst. Assuming the worst from everybody is how no one would get anything done. e2ee, like any tech not bad or good inherently helps both goodies and baddies. Not turning blind eye on this is important first step. Even if your gov doesn't get a backdoor now they will keep at it until they find a way because voters who are not extremist libertarian techbros want them to. Your way out is to help them find a good enough way witg a compromise.
orbital-decay · 78d ago
> People in Russia did the opposite of that. People in Russia were conditioned by decades of violent dictatorship and were either afraid to make a noise or actively wanted the strongman fascist rule. And the guy in power is actual ex KGB. There's a difference
I'm sorry if I'm blunt or rude but you have zero idea what you're talking about, and judging by this answer you're unlikely to even attempt to find out. It saddens me that people who have actual chance to avoid neo-feudalism learn nothing from the experience of my own country (Russia), because hey that's Eastasia and we've always been at war with Eastasia so it can be discarded, "we" are not like that, surely "we" are not "them" and can do better, it can never happen here. Well, good luck! You'll need it.
throwaway290 · 78d ago
What you quoted is reality. People who care are in those two categories with rare exceptions. If you are actually russian like me you'd know that 95% of people are in two of the above groups I described. Literally everybody you ask either voted for Putin or did not vote (if we pretend elections were real)
And you I guess have no objection to my main point. e2ee helps crime as much as good guys, maybe more because it helps scale crime. And non stupid government would see that. If what a democratic government is doing to fix this looks like censorship, then it does not mean the government is bad. There is other context. A good democratic government can be instructed by competent experts make better tradeoffs. You cannot expect politicians to be competent experts.
It saddens me that every now and then even well intentioned(?) fellow russians act like every government is like that. You're not the only one. The legacy and history of how people came to power is completely different. Yes it's hard to believe but there are governments who are different.
If you want to see how actual surveillance would look, check out russia. Chinese firewall tech, TSPU boxes at every ISP, making VPN illegal etc. Unlike EU there is historical context and evidence in which it is clear that the government is not doing this to fight crime.
orbital-decay · 78d ago
TSPU is just the consequence of a failed attempt to bring it under control, which happened much much earlier (no point in getting into detail here). And yes you're right, I actually have no objections to proportional response and keeping trust where it's possible, you can't get things done without it. Just keep in mind that "it cannot happen here" attitude is dangerous and you're always one step from what you've thought is impossible. Opposing to E2EE strikes me as similar to unified IDs in some European countries that are proud of safety and convenience it brings, dismissing the reality that they are now one regime change from the total control. (not even the unlikely change, considering that certain EU countries historically lean "right", for simplicity).
throwaway290 · 77d ago
Sure. But also remember there is also a balance between hostile distrust for all things government does and getting things done. They cannot happen at the same time.
And remember authoritative governments don't care about trust and they get things done while west is squabbling.
To say gov does it to spy is not constructive. What can you do? If they are against you you lose, they hold all the power. This reminds me of attitude of most people in Russia. But to say government does it because it doesn't know is constructive. Because it (and the public) can be educated. There are democratic processes for this.
daniel-s · 79d ago
These aren't dumb people. They know exactly what they're asking for. Privacy and security of the public's data is not a priority to them, surveillance and power is. Politicians would much prefer all communication in plaintext, to hell with individual freedoms and privacy, especially European politicians that don't come from the same traditions of freedom as the anglophone countries.
What politician do you expect to openly confess the above in public. These are world-leading politicians, i.e., professional athletes of lying and obfuscation.
whatshisface · 79d ago
>especially European politicians that don't come from the same traditions of freedom as the anglophone countries.
Have you been reading English-language news? Attempts at limiting privacy and advancing surveillance have been nonstop in the anglophone world over the past decades. What may even have been the first attempt at having a backdoor mandate was American: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
bananalychee · 79d ago
The UK and Australia are ahead of countries like France in restricting freedom, so this sounds like a poor attempt to avoid complimenting the US specifically.
Yes, they absolutely are. I agree with the rest of your comment, they aren't interested in privacy or security, want generalized surveillance, and are world-class liars.
But they are also pretty dumb and extremely ignorant of anything technical.
econ · 79d ago
I sort of agree with them. I want all privacy abolished for politicians. Think about it, if we live stream them in the shower we might get some much needed young people to take the job. Let them keep the ad revenue. Only fans suggests it should be the best paid job out there and the workers are all about public approval.
no more naughty business!
verisimi · 79d ago
That is not how it works. Politicians will vote for special measures for themselves, but citizens need to have their data easily presentable for inspection by government agencies. Think of the children/terrorists.
tonyhart7 · 79d ago
"These aren't dumb people."
they are, most tech worker didn't know how cryptography works under the hood and yet you expect politician to know it??? nah its just intelligence agency make a request to parlement of some shit
usrnm · 79d ago
Are you actually trying to say that understanding cryptography is a prerequisite for intelligence?
palata · 77d ago
In the context of a discussion where the two propositions are "they take bad decisions because they don't understand" or "they take those decisions by malice", I think the parent is trying to say "they most probably don't understand cryptography, given that most tech workers don't either and those politicians are less into tech than tech workers".
anthk · 79d ago
You mean UKUSA? Echelon? Patriot Act? SSL and encryption 'bans' making the vendors get OpenSSL from the Canadian OpenBSD?
mrweasel · 79d ago
OpenSSL = OpenSSL Software Foundation Inc / OpenSSL Software Services Inc (In the US)
OpenSSH = OpenBSD (In Canada).
OpenBSD does maintain a fork of OpenSSL, called LibreSSL.
anthk · 79d ago
OpenBSD had a SSL stack too, not bound to US licenses and restrictions on exporting.
mrweasel · 79d ago
Before the LibreSSL fork? I did not know that. They've shipped OpenSSL for as long as I can remember, and then forked it, in 2014.
How long ago was that?
anthk · 78d ago
OpenSSL built on Canada was fine. Get NetBSD from US mirrors and you got a TLS-challenged OS until the 00's when the restriction exports on tech 'as weapons' were nonsense.
mrweasel · 79d ago
No dumb perhaps, but very very short sighted and it pretty clear how other decisions can be so very wrong, once you hear them get quizzed on encryption.
"We should have a backdoor for law enforcement", okay but what if that abused by some regime that doesn't like Jews, Muslims, Christians, homosexuals, communists, authors, journalists... you? Obviously THOSE people shouldn't have access to a backdoor. Okay, but if you do it EU wide then Hungary will have access to it. Okay, only Western European nations should have access. What if AFD wins in Germany or Groupe Rassemblement National in France? Okay, in THAT case the backdoor access should be revoked. Who decides that?
It's very clear that politicians want backdoors in encryption, but only under a very specific set of circumstances. Those circumstances are almost completely tied to their own parliamentary seats. If questioned long enough, most of them will see it issue, they probably won't admit it though.
So no, not dumb, just incredibly short sighted on almost irreversible decisions that can and will hurt the wrong people.
whatshisface · 79d ago
I would like to know what the public opinion on these issues is before blaming politician's ignorance, considering that to them the relevant knowledge is knowledge of what voters will support or tolerate. The impossible promise of backdoors that France can enter but no other country, organized criminal syndicate or petty government-employed stalker can find is only one impossible promise among the many we can hear from the world's parliaments. In fact, the impossible promise is something of a stereotypical tactic.
Over an over again, politicians are asking for backdoors. To me it just proves that they don't understand the very basic of how encryption works.
Especially these days in Europe, it seems completely insane: it is already a problem that most companies use US services, given that the US have become hostile to Europe. The sane way to go is to try to get better privacy for European companies/people, not worse. Adding backdoors just makes it easier for adversaries to access private data.
Hanlon’s razor isn’t always true, sometimes it really is malice. Considering EU ministers want to exempt themselves from Chat Control, that suggests to me they do understand enough of the basics.
https://european-pirateparty.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-wan...
No comments yet
That's a very gullible take and kind of apologetic for the politicians. If you are implementing a backdoor to crypto-systems, you probably know exactly what you are doing.
That, and this has been re-surfacing time and again under different pretenses make this a deliberate attack on freedom of expression. The politicians know exactly what they are doing.
On the other hand, the interior minister himself has no clue, as well as all the politicians in the assemblée. This is where the double-bluff is from. (granted, I think Darmanain was an exception)
We have to remember that, while the minister changes with the government and thus is by definition a politician (seriously, look at some of our ministries, they go from education to health taking a trip by ecology with a pit stop in finance), the ministries themselves are made of people that mostly stay in place and are not affected by government changes. Those are the ones making the calls. And those precisely know what they're doing (thing DGSI and DGSE).
No, the career specialists in the ministries are the ones writing the reports and developing options. Ministers, in France and other democracies, bring their own staffs of experts. Those will work out a recommendation. The minister -- or more broadly speaking the politician -- makes the call.
And frankly, I don't know of another way. Nobody can be an expert on all the things that come up in a single ministry, let alone the parliament.
This is a known and accepted flaw of rotating leadership in democracies.
In other words they’re fine with intruding upon citizens privacy - this doesn’t require any understanding of encryption I think ( and if encryption prevents that, their answer would be ‘ban encryption’)
I’d say that the problem isn’t so much related to encryption, but to the fact that anything digital can be industrialized very quickly, and that the ‘if it goes wrong’ scenario can go really wrong if ( and when) your backdoor falls into the wrong hands.
From a lawmaker’s perspective, it’s just a different kind of risk, which they may or may not be assessing properly. In some ways I see it as closer to people misunderstanding how easy and how bad it is to lose large amounts of data : it’s not related to the inner workings of computers , but rather to the leverage that computers provide. The same is true with weak crypto : everything is great until suddenly everything is in the clear all at the same time, and read by people you don’t want.
When law enforcement tells you that they're being hindered by the fact that even unsophisticated criminals have E2EE messaging and that's their biggest source of evidence (pulling text records) then asking for back doors starts to sound reasonable. It isn't of course because it defeats the whole point but it doesn't have to be a crusade against speech or whatever.
Which is to say they understand the situation perfectly and are acting with a firm intellectual grasp of what is going on.
The issue isn't that they don't understand encryption, it is that they reject citizens having any sort of power to resist the state. Which is cool and all, authoritarianism is always with us to some extent. But at its core they see this from the viewpoint that the state is fundamentally in control and sometimes it grants people the privilege of privacy because it doesn't think what they are saying is important and therefore they can be humoured. They'll pretend technical ignorance if it gets the liberals off their backs, but the only people they are fooling are the credulous.
But by doing that, they make it easier for adversaries to spy on their own citizen, which is a national security issue.
That's why it sounds like ignorance to me: I understand that they really want a backdoor just for themselves "because they are the good guys" and "for national security", but they don't understand that if they have a backdoor, then their adversaries will eventually have it, too.
The people in government have a hierarchy of threats. Social challenges from within their own nation always higher than those from foreign countries. Most politicians are perfectly happy to sacrifice national security to be able to see what their citizens are saying, they just won't articulate it in plain language because it sounds bad.
We can tell this because they're signing off on narratives around being "the good guys". Anyone pushing that sort of narrative spin isn't a good guy. That isn't how law enforcement works in practice and anyone in high political power knows it if they have even a shred of intellectual honesty; they've seen how the sausage is made and are well aware that the real world is all various shades of what happens when a family breaks down and siblings start fighting with each other.
Whether they are gullible, corrupt, or simply pieces of shit and sociopaths... Why are they allowed to keep their job? And how can we fix democracy to make sure that they are held accountable?
Let's be clear about one thing: Hanlon's razor is bullshit. Globally, only about ~30% of humans think that "people are generally trustworthy". Even fewer think that "strangers can be trusted". So it fucking IS malice, and people are not trusting because they know that it is malice. In fairness you can look at nord-european countries for some counter-examples, but 30% is a good approximation.
I don't even care if politicians are stupid or malicious. They're probably both anyway because they're human. But what I care about is that they don't fuck with my hard earned civil liberties. So much blood was shed to get where we are... have we learned nothing at all?
They welcome Europeans thinking their government is out to get them
> Especially considering that the power takeover in Russia happened much in the same way - people assumed the politicians are dumb and naive
People in Russia did the opposite of that. People in Russia were conditioned by decades of violent dictatorship and were either afraid to make a noise or actively wanted the strongman fascist rule. And the guy in power is actual ex KGB. There's a difference
> your politicians
Putin?
> need to be kept in check.
Keeping in check != assuming the worst. Assuming the worst from everybody is how no one would get anything done. e2ee, like any tech not bad or good inherently helps both goodies and baddies. Not turning blind eye on this is important first step. Even if your gov doesn't get a backdoor now they will keep at it until they find a way because voters who are not extremist libertarian techbros want them to. Your way out is to help them find a good enough way witg a compromise.
I'm sorry if I'm blunt or rude but you have zero idea what you're talking about, and judging by this answer you're unlikely to even attempt to find out. It saddens me that people who have actual chance to avoid neo-feudalism learn nothing from the experience of my own country (Russia), because hey that's Eastasia and we've always been at war with Eastasia so it can be discarded, "we" are not like that, surely "we" are not "them" and can do better, it can never happen here. Well, good luck! You'll need it.
And you I guess have no objection to my main point. e2ee helps crime as much as good guys, maybe more because it helps scale crime. And non stupid government would see that. If what a democratic government is doing to fix this looks like censorship, then it does not mean the government is bad. There is other context. A good democratic government can be instructed by competent experts make better tradeoffs. You cannot expect politicians to be competent experts.
It saddens me that every now and then even well intentioned(?) fellow russians act like every government is like that. You're not the only one. The legacy and history of how people came to power is completely different. Yes it's hard to believe but there are governments who are different.
If you want to see how actual surveillance would look, check out russia. Chinese firewall tech, TSPU boxes at every ISP, making VPN illegal etc. Unlike EU there is historical context and evidence in which it is clear that the government is not doing this to fight crime.
And remember authoritative governments don't care about trust and they get things done while west is squabbling.
To say gov does it to spy is not constructive. What can you do? If they are against you you lose, they hold all the power. This reminds me of attitude of most people in Russia. But to say government does it because it doesn't know is constructive. Because it (and the public) can be educated. There are democratic processes for this.
What politician do you expect to openly confess the above in public. These are world-leading politicians, i.e., professional athletes of lying and obfuscation.
Have you been reading English-language news? Attempts at limiting privacy and advancing surveillance have been nonstop in the anglophone world over the past decades. What may even have been the first attempt at having a backdoor mandate was American: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/14/identify_and_disrupt_...
Yes, they absolutely are. I agree with the rest of your comment, they aren't interested in privacy or security, want generalized surveillance, and are world-class liars.
But they are also pretty dumb and extremely ignorant of anything technical.
no more naughty business!
they are, most tech worker didn't know how cryptography works under the hood and yet you expect politician to know it??? nah its just intelligence agency make a request to parlement of some shit
OpenSSH = OpenBSD (In Canada).
OpenBSD does maintain a fork of OpenSSL, called LibreSSL.
How long ago was that?
"We should have a backdoor for law enforcement", okay but what if that abused by some regime that doesn't like Jews, Muslims, Christians, homosexuals, communists, authors, journalists... you? Obviously THOSE people shouldn't have access to a backdoor. Okay, but if you do it EU wide then Hungary will have access to it. Okay, only Western European nations should have access. What if AFD wins in Germany or Groupe Rassemblement National in France? Okay, in THAT case the backdoor access should be revoked. Who decides that?
It's very clear that politicians want backdoors in encryption, but only under a very specific set of circumstances. Those circumstances are almost completely tied to their own parliamentary seats. If questioned long enough, most of them will see it issue, they probably won't admit it though.
So no, not dumb, just incredibly short sighted on almost irreversible decisions that can and will hurt the wrong people.