"The government's view is that anything we can think of, we can compel you to do." Which pretty much in a nutshell encapsulates what's wrong with the U.S. secu

"The government's view is that anything we can think of, we can compel you to do." Which pretty much in a nutshell encapsulates what's wrong with the U.S. security state we've built. Terrorism is the trump card, the thing that compels/allows the state to take anything it needs. As one official put it recently "We're not trying to spy on you, we're trying to find those among you who are trying to kill you" And anything they do in order to prevent that from happening is fair game. It's a perpetual state of war. Having said that, this is kind of a good news/bad news situation. The good news? Looks like most of the secret back door rumors, at least when it comes to TLS, were wrong. The bad news? It doesn't matter. If the government can try compel you to release the secret password for millions of users -- and then forbid you even to talk about it in the open -- then there truly is no limit to the monitoring and control they can exert. Whatever they get away with this year, there'll be more to come next year. Fake out https websites, play MITM games with data providers -- if you've got the keys, the world is your oyster. Back around the turn of the century, I worked on several government projects. Aside from the usual deadwood workers, there are folks that are really eager to push the technology and create as much automation and storage as possible. This is because they like to hack, just like the rest of us. I used to say, jokingly, that the only reason we didn't live in a dystopian security state was that the government was too inept to actually create one. Looks like the joke was on me. They're pretty fast learners. Make the national transaction and storage system totally secure, then lean on the in-country tech community to give you the keys to all of it. What a terrible way to destroy the national tech economy.