It's only after you get down into the technical weeds - and they are admittedly rather weedy - that it becomes clear that this is much harder than it seems and not something we're going to be able to solve.

The security of computers and the Internet is a horrible and dangerous mess. Every week we hear about breaches of databases of Social Security numbers and financial information and health records, and about critical infrastructure being insecure.

The people working in my field also are quite skeptical of our ability to do this. It ultimately boils down to the problem of building complex systems that are reliable and that work, and that problem has long predated the problem of access to encryption keys.

It's only after you get down into the technical weeds - and they are admittedly rather weedy - that it becomes clear that this is much harder than it seems and not something we're going to be able to solve.

The perspective that law enforcement is presenting seems to be a very narrow one that's focused very, very heavily on investigations of past crimes rather than on preventing future crimes. It's very important for policymakers to take that broader view because they're the ones who are trusted to look at the big picture.

As the local police department might want to decrypt a phone of a criminal suspect, so would the Chinese or the Russian or the Iranian intelligence agencies like to be able to do exactly the same thing.

There's been a certain amount of opportunism in the wake of the Paris attacks in 2015, when there was almost a reflexive assumption that, "Oh, if only we didn't have strong encryption out there, these attacks could have been prevented." But, as more evidence has come out - and we don't know all the facts yet - we're seeing very little to support the idea that the Paris attackers were making any kind of use of encryption.