In response to stories like this, it's time to get out your pen and write your various legislators again. I present to you a sample:
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Periodically this kind of demand comes up and it makes us look like utter idiots. It would be wise if someone told them to stop asking for it -- or just admit that they want to subject us all to totalitarian levels of surveillance. Points follow:
- Strong crypto is essential for the economy we have now. Restricting crypto out of the market would destroy much business economic activity and almost all consumer economic activity.
- Strong crypto with backdoors is weak crypto, even if the backdoor is a mechanism "known" only to the good guys.
- If the backdoor exists, authorities under tight oversight can generally be trusted (because verified) not to use it except through lawful means BUT
- if the backdoor exists, bad actors can 100% be trusted to pour large amounts of time, energy, money into breaking the lock. At its most insidious, all this requires is one corruptible person in the chain of responsibility for the back-doors. At its most clever, all protocols can be broken if you try hard enough. Compromising all consumer and business economic activity is just too attractive a prize for full effort not to be exerted.
- There does not exist a means to provide both strong crypto (vital to our economy) and the backdoors that our security services (and others) are demanding. The math doesn't allow it. So every time they ask for it, we all look like idiots.
This question is closed and it might be cost-effective for the government to retain some cryptography professors and researchers to remind the ignorant of these facts. It does NOTHING for the public weal or the security of the nation for the authorities to keep asking for things so impossible, only Alice's Red Queen and the ignorant masses can believe in them.
Sincerely,...
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Give it a try! Maybe they'll listen this time. In Canada, visit http://parl.gc.ca to find your MP. In the US, senate.gov and congress.gov. In the UK, www.parliament.uk. In Australia, aph.gov.au. In New Zealand, www.parliament.nz -- stamp out the crazy wherever you find it!
