Their truly sick desire to undermine the privacy and security of ordinary citizens is just that.... They won't solve more crimes by breaking encryption.
I'm not a big fan of government surveillance, but I find this argument problematic. Crime was different before the Internet and cell phones. Criminals learned to use the new tech with the rest of us. For example, not that long ago if the FBI had a person followed and his land line monitored, they could know who that person was in contact with. Today, that person might be exchanging messages over an encrypted app, on an encrypted phone, and there's no way of telling who with.
I'm with you about the fact that privacy of ordinary citizens is being undermined, and that through technology, invasive surveillance became so cheap and easy to deploy, that it's everywhere.
But let's not confuse state level surveillance of the whole population with targeted surveillance approved in a legitimate proceeding by an independent judge in an independent court against an actual criminal. Citizens typically want to allow the latter, while preventing the former. Governments tend say they're doing the latter, while doing both. So "public safety" arguments might be used to promote anti-democratic surveillance of a population, but can also be legitimate concerns of a law enforcement agency trying to investigate actual crimes.
A judge and court who rarely, if ever, deny such requests.
Innocent until proven guilty?
I don't know how to solve it, but the answer can't be stripping our law enforcement officers completely of the right to investigate what a person did or is doing.
Oh they are far from stripped.
Which is exactly why their powers need to be severely limited. In a fantasy world of rainbows and lollipops where the government are the "good guys" with only pure good in their hearts they could be trusted with limitless powers to pursue the "bad guys". In the actual world that exists, the government is made up of regular people - people who lie, cheat, steal, and do all sorts of things for their own purposes. If history has taught us anything, it should be that power corrupts. Far better that we live in a world where a small percentage of crimes go unsolved than a police state with ubiquitous tracking, surveillance and real-time monitoring where its an absolutely certainty that we all suffer the consequences.
You might be accused of a crime and then you'll be rooting for the rights of the accused or individual rights in general, or you might be the victim of a crime, in which case you might feel like supporting broader police powers.
You cannot create safety by concentrating power and authority, you create it by limiting the effects of those two.
Yes there is. That's the point of iamcasen: they have way more metadata to analyze. They can know who talked with who, when, for how long, etc.... All that information is present on the providers' servers, which is presumably available to the FBI in an investigation. Only the content remains unknown.