Comment by joncp

Any physical lock can be manipulated, even the particularly high-security ones. But in practice, most locks are not even challenged because doing so requires actually walking up to the lock and trying. You can't try every physical lock in existence; but you can try every digital lock. So the effects of, say, an encryption backdoor key compromise would be far greater and far more immediate than, say, the compromise of the Travel Sentry master keys.

With physical security the state apparatus can provide physical security in the form of police and what not, as well as deterrence and punishment.

In the world of cryptography it's... a bit harder to do something similar. In the best case they can come up with a key escrow system that doesn't suck too much, force you to use it, and hopefully they don't ever get the master keys hacked and stolen or leaked. But they're not asking for key escrow. They're asking for providers to be the escrow agents or whatever worse thing they come up with.