[3pt14159]

Governments need privacy. They literally investigate child mollestation cases. They hunt spies. They handle all sorts of messy things like divorce between couples with abuse.

I'm not commenting on the government coming in at unveiling encrypted communications, but certainly a better approach than "governments should be transparent and the people should be opaque" would be "governments should be translucent and the people should be translucent too".

[kevincox]

There is a clear difference between specific activities that need privacy (especially if it is temporary privacy or cases where it is protecting the privacy of the citizens not the government itself) and privacy by default for most or all government work.