But the counter to that counter-argument is that the traditional methods of interception had a significant practical cost and therefore an incentive to use them only when there was a legitimate interest in doing so. In our digital world, governments are trying to get access to everything on everyone.

Moreover, so far we have mostly been talking about threats due to reading data. To the extent that adverse changes are being effected as a result of attacks, most of them are probably being made using genuine credentials, which were themselves compromised.

However, the kinds of weaknesses we're talking mandating in encrypted communications would potentially also allow hostile actors to impersonate others and change the data directly. It doesn't take a genius to predict that this would create a future where everything in our ever-more-connected world is under threat, from financial transactions to medical instructions, from criminal records and intelligence profiles to control signalling for networked self-driving vehicles and essential utility supplies.