"Or explaining why they allow those backdoors exist in the first place?" Nobody that matters needs to be convinced of the value 'back doors'. Only a minority o

"Or explaining why they allow those backdoors exist in the first place?" Nobody that matters needs to be convinced of the value 'back doors'. Only a minority of the American public and privacy types are very concerned. Certainly the other government agencies i.e. UK/Germany would take it as a given in terms of 'why' such back doors are there. There's a reference above to the WaPo article yesterday revealing the longest-running and best surveillance program by the US. It was run out of Germany. The Germans were wary of using it too broadly, but they were otherwise fully behind it, and their intel agencies balked at closing it down. It's not really even very political: certainly, Democrats would be 'mostly' onboard - there isn't really much of a political base against it other than perhaps the Libertarian crowd. I should add, some major US industrialists like Apple and Google probably do care a lot, and they do matter and do have influence. But probably not enough. So while many of us may disagree, it's not at the end of the day as controversial as we may think it is.