>Citizens should not be treated or approached as enemies of the state by default.
They aren't under these types of laws. Typically the government would need to get a warrant first before this is possible. You don't have to let them be able to read your messages by default.
That's a fair point. The nature of encryption complicates this slightly though.
If the purpose of encryption is to make data unreadable, but a back-door exists that allows anyone with access to it to bypass the encryption, can the data ever really be considered unreadable?
>but a back-door exists that allows anyone with access to it to bypass the encryption
The trick is you don't do that. Ideally you would only want people with a valid warrant would be able to also decrypt the message (bypass the encryption). So the problem is that you want to design a system where this is possible. Perhaps it takes the cooperation of someone from the government and someone from within the company to verify the warrant. Perhaps you have a list of people who need to cryptographically sign the warrant.
It must in no way be possible for any of these companies to ever run a non-verified decryption mechanism on any single server, computer, or other type of device.
There are so many moving parts to manage, infinite possibilities for abuse, and it would require an absolute massive amount of trust in companies with numerous convictions for abuse of precisely that.
They aren't under these types of laws. Typically the government would need to get a warrant first before this is possible. You don't have to let them be able to read your messages by default.