My theory about the “going dark” problem is the opposite of the official government explanation. They claim that they need to be able to read the communications of bad actors. (“Bad actors” in the security sense here, not the Hollywood sense.) But the back doors they’ve engineered have more to do with weakening the keys than with breaking the algorithms. Mitigations are simple: introduce additional entropy while generating the key, use uncommonly long keys, use protocols with Perfect Forward Secrecy. Anyone serious about preventing eavesdropping can reasonably expect to do so with a bit of work.
If that’s true, then what’s the big deal about lots of ordinary people who are *not* surveillance targets also using encryption?