Yep, there is no public or secret law that would require Microsoft to backdoor Bitlocker. What's worth remembering, though, is that such a proposal came reason

Yep, there is no public or secret law that would require Microsoft to backdoor Bitlocker. What's worth remembering, though, is that such a proposal came reasonably close to becoming federal law in the 1990s. It was backed by the FBI and was approved by a House of Representatives committee, which I mention here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html An excerpt from that article: "In the 1990s, [now-VP Joe] Biden was chairman of the Judiciary Committee and introduced a bill called the Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act, which the EFF says he was "persuaded" to do by the FBI. A second Biden bill was called the Violent Crime Control Act. Both were staunchly anti-encryption, with this identical language: It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law... While neither of Biden's pair of bills became law, they did foreshadow the FBI's pro-wiretapping, anti-encryption legislative strategy that followed -- and demonstrated that the Delaware senator was willing to be a reliable ally of law enforcement on the topic. (They also previewed the FBI's legislative proposal later that decade for banning encryption products such as SSH or PGP without government backdoors, which was approved by one House of Representatives committee but never came to a vote in the Senate.)"