I think that might be too subtle. I'd go with "It's like mailing a check in a transparent envelope with the amount and pay-to fields erasable and written in with a dry erase marker."

Even more so--"It's like forcing everything sent by mail to be sent in a transparent envelope and then publishing in the news every route that mailmen take and the easiest points where to intercept them."

Laws dictating how to/not to encrypt things make news really quickly so it takes even takes out all the fun in security research.

More like: The government wants a master key that will unlock all the doors on your home, but they super promise to be real careful not to let anyone else use it.

But that's just it, and this is why techies often sound unreasonable: there absolutely is a well-defined system whereby the government can get into your home. And they do promise to be careful with that power. And they also promise to help protect you against other people's using that power. To most people, this whole debate sounds like we're saying everyone should have easy access to impossible to vaults of arbitrary size, which law enforcement can't access under any circumstances. In the physical world, hardly anyone (including me) would be in favor of such a thing. I's not hard to imagine abuses of these vaults that we wouldn't want to tolerate. If it's different in the digital world (and I tend to believe it is), the burden is on us to explain why.

Imagine the police response time to a black neighborhood where gun violence has just been reported. Now imagine the police don't have guns, cars, or any knowledge of the law because there is no black and white law. Now imagine you live in that black neighborhood. That black neighborhood is called the internet. And the government is trying to outlaw locking your door.

Another: it's like requiring safe manufacturers to have a master combination to unlock any safe.

(or, closer to what the article states: it's like requiring safe manufacturers to open any safe the government gives them, or at least require the manufacturer to provide technical assistance in breaking into their own safe)

Many people I've talked to think that's perfectly reasonable.

Phil Zimmermann used postcards as the analogy in his Why I Wrote PGP essay in 1991:

https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html