I disagree that we should trust that their intentions are "for the greater good" or even "somewhat reasonable." Government and law enforcement agencies, from to

I disagree that we should trust that their intentions are "for the greater good" or even "somewhat reasonable." Government and law enforcement agencies, from top to bottom, are staffed by individual people. As we have seen time and time again in the corporate sphere, once we get a couple committees in place it becomes easy to let things that bother an individual slide by as responsibility rests on the larger group. And, of course, once the group has managed to squash the voices of it's individual members it is open to exploitation by external forces, like money from lobbies (designed to sway the group) or bribes to individuals (often in order to get the few who disagree to align with the group). Some of the people in government and law enforcement want to decrypt data to protect people from threats. Some of these groups are looking at their authority and seeing it erode, they are looking to decrypt data to preserve that authority. As we have seen in practice, others are looking to extend their authority (as in the case of projects like Echelon, etc.) by having real-time access to people's data. While you might be able to agree with some of these people some of the time, I strongly doubt you can agree with all of them all of the time. And if you find that you cannot agree with all of them all of the time then, in my opinion, they probably should not have the ability to decrypt any of your data. I think we all would do well to remember that while government and authority love to talk about pornography, child abduction and terrorism the vast majority of people have nothing of the sort on their phones or computers. Protecting the data that everyone has should not be forgotten (financial, private, corporate, etc.)