This doesn't address one of the most polarizing points regarding encryption: backdoors. The bank analogy kind of breaks down in this case, because the federal g

This doesn't address one of the most polarizing points regarding encryption: backdoors. The bank analogy kind of breaks down in this case, because the federal government always has the power to freeze your assets at any bank in the U.S. So how do you discuss the pros and cons of government-accessible encryption backdoors in today's context of security and terrorism? I really don't have a good answer to that and I genuinely wish I did. I would love if somebody could share their thoughts and maybe present a strong argument in simple words that I can share with friends and family whenever this issue comes up. Here is approach I took to this issue when speaking with my father. Opting for a backdoored communication channel as opposed to end-to-end encryption is a massive liability to the company that can end up costing them the trust of their users in addition to monetary costs. Having end-to-end encryption means that (assuming the actual encryption scheme is sound, and I'm aware that that's a big if) it is literally impossible for any hacker, no matter how much control they now have over the system in question, to retrieve the contents of these messages. It might be theoretically possible for them to compromise future interactions (and that's why incident response needs to be as swift as possible), but at least the past is safe. Now imagine the liability a smaller company is taking on when they decide to store all user data and hand the government the keys. There is now a significantly greater possibility of something going wrong. Maybe they accidentally cached the plaintext, maybe they mess up the encryption, maybe the decryption key has been compromised. The point is that it simply doesn't make sense from a capitalist point of view to take on that kind of risk for no monetary benefit. That is at least one way to see it, I think.