Such implicit pessimism is a bit premature. We've already had one legislative wack at the problem and the results were close and extremely promising, e.g. they didn't break down in any conventional way (by party, region, etc.)
We already know from history that the American system can draw back from this sort of thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee), it's way too early to assume that won't happen again. (One caveat, the Church Committee did its work after the death of J. Edgar Hoover.)
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Such implicit pessimism is a bit premature. We've already had one legislative wack at the problem and the results were close and extremely promising, e.g. they didn't break down in any conventional way (by party, region, etc.)
We already know from history that the American system can draw back from this sort of thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee), it's way too early to assume that won't happen again. (One caveat, the Church Committee did its work after the death of J. Edgar Hoover.)
We also won the Cold War/Clinton era "Crypto Wars"; this account is U.K. centric (I'm amazed at their success), I'll note we won earlier in the US: http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars (HT betterunix in this current discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302520).