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>it is almost guaranteed China, Russia or any other country will eventually break it and potentially use it for blackmail to get their hands on corporate or nat

>it is almost guaranteed China, Russia or any other country will eventually break it and potentially use it for blackmail to get their hands on corporate or national secrets. In fairness, this is pretty naive too. The idea that a backdoor exists, and our intelligence community is not monitoring the proclivities of, say, Halliburton's chairman, is fanciful in the extreme. I think it's safe to assume that everyone would be recorded, and some people would be watched in such a scenario. Anyone above VP level at Oscar Meyer, Boeing, Procter and Gamble, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc would be pretty high up on that "watch" list. Probably even anyone who knows the CEO at Boeing, or Intel, or whatever would be high up on that list. I always look at it this way, the intelligence guys are at least as smart as I am, and if I had a back door, that's the minimum list of who I would watch. I think it very likely that we would have gotten to those guys and gals long before any Chinese, Indian, Israeli, or whatever nation's operative would. This is part of the insidiousness of backdoors.

close04 7y ago
> and our intelligence community What happens when a foreign or hostile intelligence community gets their hands on some of those secrets? Just because "your own" know them already doesn't mean they're completely worthless for all the others. An adversary armed with such secrets can change the course of an election, undermine certain people and initiatives to promote others or change a company's leadership, etc. And they can do it with 0 accountability since they never have to ever directly leverage the information, just release it in very targeted ways to the people who will then do all the work, knowingly or not. Having backdoors is a bad idea and it has proven as much time and time again. And coming out in public to say "corporations can have their way but regular people have to be kept on a leash" is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect from someone on the wrong side of such a backdoor, someone with no choice but to prostrate themselves.

close04 7y ago

> and our intelligence community What happens when a foreign or hostile intelligence community gets their hands on some of those secrets? Just because "your own" know them already doesn't mean they're completely worthless for all the others. An adversary armed with such secrets can change the course of an election, undermine certain people and initiatives to promote others or change a company's leadership, etc. And they can do it with 0 accountability since they never have to ever directly leverage the information, just release it in very targeted ways to the people who will then do all the work, knowingly or not. Having backdoors is a bad idea and it has proven as much time and time again. And coming out in public to say "corporations can have their way but regular people have to be kept on a leash" is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect from someone on the wrong side of such a backdoor, someone with no choice but to prostrate themselves.