I'd be very interested in hearing from child abuse investigators how the controls in the bill line up with how tech is used in abusing children. My expectation is that there is very little alignment, because "for the children" is most often the rallying cry of politicians who want something that is not in the best interests of the people they are supposed to represent.
No, you're putting words in their mouth.
You have your head in the sand if you don't think people use perfectly legitimate encryption service to discuss illegal activity. But that is not a reason to ban encryption. The entire US constitution is built on the premise that people have rights.
But it has always been true that some people use their rights to avoid having their criminal activity detected. That doesn't make our rights any less important.
Nobody is putting words in anybodies mouth.
As much as I'm near-absolutist on civil liberties, I think it's also valuable to recognize that the intrinsic good of individual rights are only one part of the story; the other is the balance of power between government and the governed.
I recently heard Sam Harris opine that from a utilitarian perspective, an absolutist right to privacy pales in comparison to allowing harm to come to children, and so the tech community needs to flex a little on the privacy question, and meet law enforcement halfway. Through that reductionist lens, it's hard to find fault in the argument.
The problem isn't limited to privacy, though. Unbreakable digital locks exist, and they aren't going anywhere. [0] And there is power in the ability to keep secrets. You can bet the Feds have little interest in a Panopticon, where they too are obstructed from keeping digital secrets, as "meeting us halfway" for some greater good. Rather, they want to hoard that asymmetric power as their exclusive purview. No matter how well-intentioned, that asymmetry of raw power is something We The People have a vested interest in taking seriously, far beyond some abstract notion of "I want to Google ${CONSENTING_ADULT_SEXUAL_ACTIVITY} without worrying the neighbors will find out".
The Chinese made mass surveillance even simpler: they have lots of cameras and face detection.
We don't have much privacy these days.
Secondly when a party consistently pushes for an extreme position if you meet them halfway as a matter of policy you will shortly find yourself within spitting distance. The only productive position is extreme obstinacy.
I'd say it's pretty easy. For utilitarianism to make sense, it has to take the future into account. And what looks like an absolutist right to privacy might be a utilitarian argument of the type that if you grant a monopoly of power (private or public) the right to make use of your private information, then it could well use that private information against you later.
An integral utilitarian might then say "it's worth some harm to children today to ensure there won't be great harm tomorrow". That kind of being able to trade off different scenarios of harm without regard to absolute principle is pretty much what characterizes (act) utilitarianism.
Obviously this bill is about more than that, but I think that statement pretty much torpedoes their main public argument.
What specific controls are you asking about?