Sounds like Let's Encrypt would also fall under that.
This has got to stop. If you want to stop criminals, then focus on their illegal activites, not the streets they walk on. I walk on them too. And don't use CP as a catch-all argument to insert backdoors.
Their big problem here is that previously, it was hard to find people with the same opinion as you. If you couldn't find someone in the same village who wanted to start a rebellion, it probably wouldn't happen. Today, someone can post a Telegram group message and make thousands of people rally to a town square. I see the dangers, and I see why governments think they are doing this to protect the people. No one wants civil war. That is still not a strong enough reason to call road construction a hostile activity.
I'm back in Sweden after 12 years abroad. Time to read up on which parties are sane and which aren't when it comes to technical infrastructure.
Could? I know of government employees who literally cannot do their job, yet somehow they've been employed for over twenty years. When I say they can't do their job, I mean they have to ask coworkers how to do something that is and always has been a job requirement, and they have to "ask for help" every time. People are actually enabling massive amounts of waste and inefficiency.
Then there are those who don't even have work to do, and will take offense if you ask them to justify their continued employment. As though they are owed a position in the organization tomorrow just because they have a position in the company today.
I wish I could say that was an unusual experience. In another jurisdiction it took two months and we finally got to the point where even providing specific coaching telling them that it wasn't working because they opened the TCP port numbers we said instead of UDP, even though UDP was heavily emphasized. The stonewalling and constant battling ended up delaying our launch to the point where the decision makers decided to just can it instead of fight with their own IT organization.
Now that said, I have worked with some truly incredible and brilliant people on the government side. There definitely are some fantastic people that work for the government. Unfortunately they seem to be in a minority.
It sure is not. I'm not going to list all the examples I know as embarrassing some departments does not end well but I have to share this one. I tried to email someone at the California DMV a couple decades ago. My email bounced and I got a strange routing error. I assumed the problem was on my end. The first thing I did was dig their MX records and what did I get? 2 MX records with RFC1918 address space (10.0/8). I managed to get through to a real person on the phone and that went nowhere. They eventually fixed it some months later but they probably enjoyed the email silence.
Another one involved a 3 letter agency that should know better and could not figure out how to install an intermediate certificate on their website. They expected me to instead install their certificate on all of our servers and got mad & huffy puffy when I refused. I am not naming them but after a couple years they figured it out.