Exactly. An actual strong encryption backdoor would be impractical and/or would be immediately broken and leaked / dead on arrival (the entire crypto community would be motivated, on a personal level, to undermine this). The thing we have to worry about is players like Facebook allowing MITM snooping on behalf of the government without having an actual backdoor, as they have already agreed to do. I think Apple and others would sooner disobey a court order and throw lawyers and money at the problem than snoop for the gov, though, which would be a very good thing. We need to keep pressure on Facebook and keep exposing companies that give in to requests like this.

Yeah, Cloudflare is already mitm-ing tons of traffic every day. And have admitted through their ceo to scan the traffic for law enforcement!

> have admitted through their ceo to scan the traffic for law enforcement!

I'm not disagreeing, but you gotta cite that one. To educate the readers.

> What is to stop China, Russia, or some other nation state from using it in the US to intercept the communications of lawmakers,

Because NSA can't legally "spy" on US citizens, they would be happy to allow UK, or say NZ, to access those backdoors and record everything US citizens do. Then they just have to find a loophole in how to access that information later. Granted they can probably just redefine what "searching" and "access" means, which do already, but this would open even more loopholes and possibilities.

It's sometimes useful to think of these government agencies not as working for the US citizens but as adversaries who work against our interests.

> Because NSA can't legally "spy" on US citizens, they would be happy to allow UK, or say NZ, to access those backdoors and record everything US citizens do.

This is, modulo using the hypothetical backdoors under general discussion, pretty much exactly what the "Five Eyes" member states (which set includes .nz and .uk) are doing for one another already.

> communications of lawmakers, CEOs

> Nor are we necessarily talking about the customized encryption used by large business enterprises to protect their operations. We are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, e-mail, and voice and data applications.

It is AG Barr's suggestion (as far as I can tell from the quote above) that these are not regular consumers so they should get "the real thing". Everyone else would get the "inspectable encryption" version.

That's my understanding as well, but it's a pretty insulting suggestion. Why is a business's privacy more important than my own?

Because businesses donate more money to politicians than you do.

I think most of us around here on HN and "tech people" in general understand that particular set of issues around encryption backdoors.

It seems to me that certain lawmakers and people like Barr either don't put the time in to understand or are willfully ignorant to further their own goals.

Supposedly Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I think that applies here.

How about perfectly informed and extremely malicious?