https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment
> Amendment IV > > The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
You seem to be arguing against a strawman created by a limitation of our current technology. We don't have a way to give them limited access. Right now, we can give them everything, or we can give them nothing. But they're not asking for everything. So we should find a way to allow truly (technologically) limited access, and to make sure that those limits are tight.
The 4th amendment doesn't really affect any of the original crypto argument, because the search cannot be performed. Cryptography prevents the "this is the way that's acceptable" act from even starting. Note that the amendment simply says that a warrant is allowable in a bounded implementation; it doesn't demand that warrants must be executable.
For instance, if a warrant is issued to search a non-existent building it's just as moot. It doesn't require the building to be created if it's not there.
I'm not saying it's right but it's the way it is right now.
Criminals are still citizens with rights, or else Due Process has no meaning. Striving to reduce the rights of any citizen is not a defensible goal for a US governmental organization. Rights should apply to all, or they're not really rights. The government steps in when rights are violated.
> But that doesn’t make the organization’s goals incoherent or evil, it means there must be a system of checks and balances.
It does make the organization's goals anti-constitutional.
> The ideal goal is one of compromise - we want to reduce net criminality, but we want to increase privacy.
No. No all the way. We don't and can't "reduce net criminality" directly. That drifts into implications of policing pre-crime, for which everybody in law enforcement wants surveillance as a magic bullet. Beyond "just" constitutional concepts, I think a lot of people would classify pre-crime surveillance, engagement, and enforcement as actual full blown Evil.
The penal system of a free and civilized country should police actual wrongdoings; and should foster positive educational, cultural, and environmental shifts away from crime. Not destroy freedoms in the name of "protecting" them (when in reality their goal is increasing internal & external political metrics), as the ghastly hypocritical current systems do.
This isn't some new balance to be discovered. It is a clear limitation of powers to prevent violations of rights that already represents a balance.