[rndgermandude]

Encryption is nothing like a lock. We should stop using that analogy.

Encryption relies on a secret. It's like burying a treasure in a place only you know, and keeping the location a secret (e.g. in your head). Encryption just gives you a huge digital space where you can bury your treasure instead of a physical space where you can bury it.

Sure, people can just search everywhere for your pirate gold (brute-force attack), use advanced reasoning to narrow the search space, like "you lacked the means to 'bury' it in solid stone" (cryptanalysis), develop technology to speed up the search like ground-penetrating radar (e.g. GPUs, asic, special purpose programs) or try to coerce you to reveal the location (monkeywrench-to-knee passphrase cracking).

What the governments wants is that the maker of the shovel you used to bury your treasure not only has to track where you took that shovel but also has to tell the government that information without you telling the government got the information.