"The societal default used to be that substantially all conversations were inaccessible to the government except through testimony" Sure. Before the telegraph

"The societal default used to be that substantially all conversations were inaccessible to the government except through testimony" Sure. Before the telegraph was invented. And even before that people used security measures, such as wax seals on letters to prevent tampering or at least have an ability to detect whether or not the message has been tampered with. You seem to think of messaging systems as if they were spoken conversations in private. They are not. Just because you are chatting with someone from the privacy of your own home, doesn't negate the fact that your words are traveling through a lot of wires and boxes belonging to all sorts of private and public entities. During WW2, American federal government established Office of Censorship whose sole purpose was to review and censor all communications coming into and out of the country. Now imagine them finding that someone is mailing letters written in an unbreakable code. How long do you think it would take for the FBI to break down that person's door? I am not saying we should not have end to end encryption. I am saying that government spying on citizens is nothing new, it is not something that was ever limited to totalitarian dictatorships and it should not be surprising to anyone that the government is trying to fight it. The news is not that the government wants to keep an option to read your communications. The news is that first time in history there is a chance people might want to and be able to stop them.