Anonymity IS a fundamental right and it has to be that way. The nature of encryption is such that you cannot weaken it without giving rogue nations and criminals total unfettered access to the entire banking system, commerce, healthcare, and critical infastructure such as energy supplies and the water supply.
That's just how it us, and there's no way to avoid it. Your choice us a simple one - either allow people to be anonymous, or provide North Korean hacker groups like Lazarus unrestricted control over everything.
You cannot make encryption that can only be broken by good guys. As soon as a tech company can break the encryption, the bad actors will be able to do the same. And when that can amount to hundreds of billions of US dollars or the capacity to hold a nation to ransom, damn right the bad actors will find out how - and fast.
But it's worse. There is a reason that those in the military communicate classified data using secure telephony units, where there is a prohibition on chitchat. Any chat beforehand provides attackers with information that weakens the security. In other words, context weakens security.
You want as little context as you possibly can, preferably none. And that's why you need not just security but anonymity as well. You must prevent bad actors from causing harm.
Now we get to the second half of the equation - do they need the messages at all? Well, it's cheaper than having field agents, but field agents can intercept all lines of communication AND provide useful context.
So, the answer is "no they don't, and using just wiretaps gives vastly poorer intelligence, but it looks better to the accounts who don't have to worry about the consequences of botching things".