I have been following this surveillance and privacy debate. I understand that encryption cannot go both ways. We cannot create back doors that are only available to the good guys. Add to this that the 'good' guys are known to abuse power.
But I also cannot deny that at certain times there are legitimate reasons for law enforcement. What solution, maybe political if not technical, can we adopt to meet the legitimate demands of law enforcement?
One big problem is how to distinguish "legitimate" from not. In ideal conditions you'd have a court order to do so. But what good is a court order in places where it is very hard to know the difference between a gangster and a police officer (e.g.: Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, ...)? How do you protect the "solution" from the bad guys when you are not sure who the good guys and the bad guys are?
But, politically, nothing can be done because encryption and decryption is purely technical -- there is no middle ground that I see.
From a technical perspective.., the solution is also just to give the keys away. Theoretically we could give all the private keys to "just one government agency" so that no middleman (e.g. a CDN, etc) can decrypt the data, but this still 100% trusts the government with all the data.