I think this is quite similar to ad-blocking. If ads would have stayed small instead of becoming assholes, nobody would have adblockers. And if the intelligence agencys wouldn't spy on anyone but only with a court-order, encryption wouldn't be that interesting as well.
Not really. Before the 80s brought ubiquitous personal computers, and academic cryptography became a thing, the NSA and its friends had pretty much a monopoly on strong encryption. That is, encryption was implemented by dedicated hardware. There weren't that many manufacturers, and they were under intense pressure to only sell strong encryption to the NSA and friends, and sell backdoored stuff to everyone else.
So anyway, we went through this in the 90s (the Clipper Chip). That died down, in part because terrorists and criminals weren't really using much encryption. But now we have iPhones with strong encryption, and TLAs and LEOs are seriously freaked.
