Bear with me here, but I think it comes down to believing in a "benign government", coupled with a misunderstanding of the technology. Under a benign governmen

Bear with me here, but I think it comes down to believing in a "benign government", coupled with a misunderstanding of the technology. Under a benign government (as arguably we have in most of Europe), we can have a reasonable assumption that the state will act in the interests of the population. The public sector workers who have chosen that line of work probably believe in what they're doing and want to do it well. The government has always had the ability to steam letters open, and they will always need to, in order to fulfill their duties to the population. Of course, requests such as adding a back door to end-to-end encryption are unnecessary when they could take control of one of the devices in some fashion...