Just as the government has been pretending that backdoors are possible without a loss of privacy, the tech community has been pretending that backdoors are indi

Just as the government has been pretending that backdoors are possible without a loss of privacy, the tech community has been pretending that backdoors are indistinguishable from a complete loss of the benefits of encryption. Don't get me wrong: I'm totally against backdoors, and I do consider them a significant weakening of any encryption. But it's just disingenuous to insist that, for example, a system with the same sort of requirements as exist for search warrants is entirely equivalent to a system without those. Or that one-out-of-two encryption schemes do not exist. Or that it is totally impossible for an agency to keep a keyfile secure. As but one example for the last: SSL certificate authorities are already entrusted with keys whose loss has just about the same sort of security implications as breaking messaging encryption might have. And that system is working somewhat decently, including in cases where those keys were breached and certificates had to be revoked.