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Photo by PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

The big change, according to Israel, is that governments are now saying “fix it for us or we will fix it for you.” That’s led to concerns among privacy experts that the government will try to legislate a requirement for tech companies to build backdoors for law enforcement.

When encryption is done properly, the information on the device will not even be visible to the company that made it. The government would essentially be asking them to hack their own products.

“They’re clueless. They think they can fix the problem? I don’t even know what that means,” said Ann Cavoukian, a former Ontario privacy commissioner and head of the Privacy by Design Centre of Excellence at Ryerson University. “You can’t just create the odd backdoor” without compromising everything, said Cavoukian.

Israel said the idea that there’s a growing technology gap between bad actors and law enforcement is “not an empirically sound statement.” Although encrypted communications may make things more difficult, it’s counter-balanced by the massive amount of publicly-available information on the internet that can be a goldmine for investigators.

The Canadian government could also hope that some other country solves the problem for them by passing a similar law, Israel said.

They’re clueless. They think they can fix the problem? I don’t even know what that means

Because the security features are such a fundamental part of any device, it would be impractical to build and rebuild on a country-by-country basis. If a country passes legislation that requires security changes, each company would have to decide whether to play ball or withdraw the product from the country entirely.