I'm not suggesting we shouldn't push for new / changing of laws, but does it really alter the trajectory?
There are probably a lot of companies that find backdoor type requirements burdensome, and are only complying because the law is secret, uncertain or unfavorable to freedom. If you passed a law that said, "Complying with any request, including those issued by government agencies, to insert a backdoor into or otherwise weaken the security of a cryptographic protocol is illegal" and imposed some steep fines for violators, then companies would be in the opposite position from the one they are now, and they cautious position would be one where they say, "Sorry, government, if anyone found out we did that we could get shut down or lose a ton of money."
That said, an engineering solution is a much more attractive one to me than a social/administrative solution. Hopefully end-to-end encryption will become widespread and there won't be much that anyone can do about it. Still, the problem is that security is really hard, so having engineering and administrative controls is probably better than just one of the two (i.e. you're always encrypting your traffic end-to-end, but if something leaks out of a side-channel it's illegal for the NSA to be looking for it anyway, so both controls have to fail in order for the NSA to snoop on you).
I am a child of the Portuguese revolution. My family lived under the Salazar dictatorship.
My Spanish, Greek, East Germany, Eastern Europe friends "enjoyed" similar experiences.
Whatever the law says are dead letters. The security agencies are the law.
So for us Europeans it is very hard to understand how the common American thinks such agencies follow any law.