Yes, facepalm.

Cory Doctor writes:

It’s impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security. If you want to secure your sensitive data either at rest – on your hard drive, in the cloud, on that phone you left on the train last week and never saw again – or on the wire, when you’re sending it to your doctor or your bank or to your work colleagues, you have to use good cryptography. Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the “good guys” are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well sky-write it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption.

 http://boingboing.net/2017/06/04/theresa-may-king-canute.html

P.S. I should note that the King Canute reference in the title is wrong. King Canute explicitly set out to demonstrate to his people that he wasn’t all-powerful. He was wise. Theresa May is not King Canute.