I'm not certain that they understand what they're asking for, can't be done. That is, there are politicians who believe math can be bent to fit the law.
Worth noting that Malcolm Turnbull made part of his money from investing in the internet sector in the early 90s. He invested $500,000 in OzEMail (one of Australia's first internet service providers) back in 1994, and sold his stake for $57 Million to Worldcom in 1999. He's not an engineer, but he's not entirely ignorant on these matters.
I mean asking Facebook to reveal encrypted data? What even is that? The data is stored readable on both the device and presumably facebook's servers, and is only encrypted in-transit if a user enables that.
Are they asking that the data not be secure in-transit?
It's a nonsense request, until they clarify what exactly it is they want.
If this ruins them economically, maybe the world needs a proper example of what happens when politicians don't understand science.
(On the other hand, didn’t the first crypto wars end around the time someone put the RSA equations onto a T-shirt to circumvent export rules?)
The equations themselves were never export restricted, nor was computer code printed in text in a book (since OCR wasn't considered good enough at the time yet).
It doesn't stand out as a great example of "on the other hand".