This isn’t necessarily true. You assume individuals are going to be able to protect private keys and it’s increasingly unlikely to be the case.
I’m pretty good with security myself but I wont pretend like I’m so good that I could protect a critical private key. I would have to admit to you the truth and that in order to protect that key it would have to be broken up and distributed among other trusted third parties.
If you knew what I knew about security you would understand why I believe that private key holders will not be more secure and also if any individual stands in the way of for example a billion dollars it would not take a lot of effort to extract their private key. Individuals should not have that kind of responsibility and most individuals who know better don’t want it.
Special forces are a different breed because they have been trained specifically for what they are doing and they know how to handle private keys. Edward Snowden because of where he worked and what he knew was probably in a position to know how to protect his private keys. The average citizen is not Edward Snowden and even the average NSA employee probably isn’t Edward Snowden.
So for most people if you have ubiquitous encryption it wouldn’t actually protect them and also there are ways which are scalable which can steal private keys in a bottom up manner. So it’s not even clear that ubiquitous encryption would work for very long.
What it would do is cause a temporary black out for law enforcement. Then law enforcement would change their methods and instead of doing top down surveillance they’ll start targeting everyone. First they’ll probably target people associated with encryption and associated with certain risky subject matter but over time the pendulum will swing back in their direction.
What you have to understand is it is an arms race. It always has been. The advantage always swings back and forth with brilliant people on both sides.
I will say this much, in certain situations, in certain less developed nations, where there aren’t brilliant code breakers like there are in developed nations, in these countries I think the advantage could last a generation. I don’t think the advantage will last long in developed countries that have the money to do something about it.