For months, the FBI, the National Security Agency and an alphabet soup of other spooky agencies have been lashing out at tech companies that have responded to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations by starting to protect customers with stronger encryption. But it’s increasingly obvious that the government’s crypto panic is powered by fear, not facts.

Last week at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, Department of Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson begged Silicon Valley companies to give the government access to encrypted communications, asking the crowd to “imagine the problems if well after the advent of the telephone, the warrant authority of the government to investigate crime had extended only to the U.S. mail.”

“Imagine an America where federal, state and municipal law enforcement agencies cannot access critical communications, even when legally authorized to do so,” begins a recent Wall Street Journal blog post written by Amy Hess, the FBI’s executive assistant director. “Imagine the injustice if a suspected criminal can hide incriminating communications without fear of discovery by the police or if information that could exonerate an innocent party is inaccessible.”

The reason the FBI, Homeland Security and other agencies want us to imagine these frightening scenarios is that their encryption problem is just that: imaginary. It’s built on the false premise that making encryption more accessible will allow criminals to shield themselves from the law. The only solution, the government says, is for companies to put backdoors into their devices and apps, which by definition means installing defects that make our data more vulnerable to criminals and spies.

One need look only at what law enforcement agencies are doing in secret to see that these predictions of digital anarchy are pure fantasy.

Earlier this month, Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai discovered that the Drug Enforcement Administration has been buying hacking tools from an Italian company, Hacking Team, through a shell company based in Maryland. The software, Remote Control System, is a remote host-based interception suite that allows police to infect devices, steal passwords, intercept Skype calls and even monitor targets in real time through their webcams. Researchers discovered it (and a competing product, FinFisher) is being used to spy on journalists and activists in Morocco, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates and other countries with notoriously poor human rights records.

Here’s how Hacking Team advertises the software (emphasis added):

You cannot stop your targets from moving. How can you keep chasing them? What you need is a way to bypass encryption, collect relevant data out of any device and keep monitoring your targets wherever they are, even outside your monitoring domain. Remote Control System does exactly that.

These kinds of tools aren’t new, but their recent prevalence as commercial products underscores how government agencies are increasingly utilizing hacker techniques. The FBI has been in the hacking business for more than a decade, and it recently won new powers to hack computers even when their user and location are unknown. This despite the fact that in 2013, a judge in Texas rejected an FBI request to send spyware to an unknown suspect’s computer, saying the agency offered “little more than vague assurances” that it wouldn’t intrude on innocents in the process.

From a practical standpoint, these tactics make sense. Encryption protects data using impossibly complicated math, and it’s infinitely easier to solve complicated math problems by stealing the answers than by cracking the code. The strongest encryption in the world won’t save you if someone can get inside your computer and steal your encryption keys, and products such as Remote Control System and FinFisher are giving those capabilities to police and governments around the globe.