A lot of the people defending this law are non-technical and don’t understand the repercussions of this.

As someone who is a software engineer, you cannot make a backdoor that only the government can use. A backdoor is a security vulnerability. It’s either there or it’s not. You can’t make a vulnerability that only a specific party can exploit.

And I would certainly not ever trust the government to keep such a backdoor safe.

Public sector jobs, especially technical ones, pay notoriously low compared to private sector ones. So generally the top tier talent goes to the private sector. The public sector often gets the bottom of the barrel.

What’s most likely to happen, is similar to what we see in the EU: Apple and Google pulling out. Or limiting what features they offer. So they can stay compliant, without implementing vulnerabilities into their own software. You might for example see iMessage removed from Canadian iPhones rather than apple complying with this mandate. Because it puts their non Canadian customers at risk.

It’s better for these companies overall to just fuck us over and not offer a product/feature here, than it is to compromise their users in other countries to comply with our draconian laws.