This was hard to tolerate.

Can someone explain to me why wiretapping can't just.. evolve? Upon a court order, send a guy to bug someone's house with cameras and watch him put in his password. Use a microphone to listen to him type in his password, perhaps even from a distance, then use some open source tool to convert the audio data into keypresses & similar. Order the ISP to copy the packets for you so you can do traffic analysis. Order companies the guy has accounts on to cough up whatever data they actually have access to. Intercept his mail. Follow him around.

Encryption doesn't prevent any of these things, so what's with all the focus on it? Wiretapping was never zero cost, and we the people only consented to the norm of court ordered wiretapping in a world in which it took some effort to do. It ought to stay difficult.