“in part because they’re afraid hackers could exploit those same back doors”
Not could, would. There is a 100% probability that if backdoors were built into encryption standards, they would be found and exploited. No matter how long it would take to find them, the reward is so great that it would justify any expense and effort to ferret them out.
It would not be limited to hackers either. Every foreign government on the planet that can afford an intelligence apparatus would be trying to find those backdoors as well, so this would compromise our domestic security in a very fundamental way that would outweigh any potential benefits.
If DOJ takes down Apple on backdoor encryption, everything is done.
Right now they are the only ones fighting the US Gov.
Not Intel, not Google, not Microsoft.