I agree that criminals will use secure communications regardless of the law. I don't understand what you mean when you say it will increase crime though.
Regardless, I feel like there's a deeper motive from governments/law enforcement. It would allow them to claim that anyone using secure comms must have something to hide and is thus a criminal. Combine that with mass surveillance and anyone you see sending encrypted traffic can automatically be assumed to be a criminal. I'm not saying this is right, it's certainly not right. But I'm sure that's the argument that will be used by those trying to push it.
The only way to fix this is secure-by-default comms, such that all traffic looks the same and you cannot make any claims of criminality based on that alone.
> I don't understand what you mean when you say it will increase crime though.
Suppose you're a criminal organization or a foreign government. You break into AT&T or Amazon or whomever and get access to a bunch of data streams. If they're all E2EE, you have a bunch of inscrutable ciphertext. If they're not, you have everybody's passwords, trade secrets, credit card numbers, information useful for blackmail etc. Lack of strong encryption enables crime -- that's why honest people use strong encryption.
This is also a good reason to use a VPN and tools like Tor, even when you have nothing to hide. The more normal it becomes the less likely it can be used as presumption of guilt or probable cause.
Regardless, I feel like there's a deeper motive from governments/law enforcement. It would allow them to claim that anyone using secure comms must have something to hide and is thus a criminal. Combine that with mass surveillance and anyone you see sending encrypted traffic can automatically be assumed to be a criminal. I'm not saying this is right, it's certainly not right. But I'm sure that's the argument that will be used by those trying to push it.
The only way to fix this is secure-by-default comms, such that all traffic looks the same and you cannot make any claims of criminality based on that alone.