"“I certainly see this banding together as a way for the U.S. government to try to exert more gravitas in the U.S. debate,” said Riana Pfefferkorn, cryptography fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.
“Many of the tech companies that are in the Five Eyes' sights are U.S.-based, and it naturally exerts more pressure on those companies to have five countries (most of which presumably provide significant user bases for those companies), not just the U.S., band together to press them on encryption,” she told me in an email."