Allowing governments access to IM history gives them way more power than they ever had. This is not just restoring lost powers. Never has to government been able to see your entire history of every conversation going back for years. I think most of us would be ok if it were actually possible to create a system where only the government after going through proper court process was able to intercept the messages from that time and forward but currently there is no good proposed solution and very dangerous laws like those in australia are being approved.
Even with a messaging app, imagine that you created a new one, and then found that for some reason 90% of your user base is hitmen communicating with their clients. Maybe that's not your fault, but I think you would be ethically obligated to shut it down, or significantly modify it to stop enabling hitmen.
Obviously these are contrived examples, and often in real life it's impossible to make a tool that can't be used for evil. But I don't think you're devoid of responsibility just because you didn't intend for your creation to be abused. If you accidentally created something dangerous, you have an obligation to take reasonable measures to mitigate the danger.
All that being said, I do agree that in some cases there is a definite ethical burden on a creator to consider the impact of his creation - I just think that in many cases the best solution is not to change the tool to avoid misuse but to figure out why the misuse occurs/would occur in the first place and try to solve that. I would conjecture that the misuse more often than not points to a deeper social issue that is for some reason not being properly dealt with but which is actually a really big deal that no one wants to confront. I can think of a few examples but I think that level of exploration may be better suited to a blog post than a comment.
People get killed by mobs in China[1] as well, a country which backdoors all major social networks (Weibo etc) + at network edge (great firewall).
Remember Nextel direct connect? It was known that those communications weren’t tappable initially, and for a time every street level drug salesman had them.
I mean, yeah, sure it's something to consider. But it's not exactly like too much surveillance hasn't ever killed anyone.
(Looks around the office and sees the Echo and Google Home, remembers how many friends have those and/or Samsung "Smart TVs" in their home, or who have their phones constantly listening for "OK Google" or "Hey Siri". Right. As you were...)
The state should be able to get a warrant to intercept communications for reasonable cause, and the accused should be able to litigate the validity of the search.
Pretending that technology is infallible is a defect equally as bad as NSL with respect to the rule of law.
Obviously no complex IT system is infallible, and now we have a situation that with no legal remedy, the police and intelligence services are compromising or allowing latent defects to remain in order to fulfill their missions.
You never hear about law enforcement concerns with respect to iMessage or Signal, so it is likely that whatever security you think you have from the state is not meaningfully there.
Governments are more powerful actors on this playing field, but they are far from the only ones on the field.
A warrant doesn't expose something your saying to the government, it exposes what you're saying to anyone who might be listening.
We're not talking the equivalent of handing some documents over to the police, we're saying the police are ordering us to stick the documents to the window of our house so that they can see them.
If you don't agree with the poster then engage in debate, don't just click the little arrow to try to grey it into oblivion.
We're all here to learn. Why not learn how to challenge this fairly widely-held view. Imagine you're talking with a 'normal' at a Christmas party and they say that; do you just stomp away singing LALALA?
Who do our tools serve? Is it just that they should be made to serve someone else, against us? Where, exactly, is the line on one side of which it's justified, but on the other it's abuse? How do you build a system that prevents abusive uses, but allows appropriate ones?
Decrying absolutist positions is all well and good, but it is a nigh-on tautology-level truth that a system with a flaw or backdoor, will be exploited — usually in multiple ways, and well beyond any potentially intended such.
Myself, I'm not quite so convinced as you seem to be of the harm of "absolutist" positions. Maybe the truth isn't always somewhere in the middle