> which might have been displaced later by other countries' agencies or top-level hackers in 2012 and 2014
Which is why deliberately compromising crypto is short sighted and dangerous.
At the moment the faustian bargain looks tempting: access all those secrets for national security. Until the whole compromised stack is exploited by a foreign power, and Mephistopheles will show up on the Senate floor demanding our soul. And the politicians will be clambering over each other to appear like they always thought it was a bad idea.
This is like having many locks, alarm systems, cameras and more on your home and then leaving the key + keycode out back under a rock or over the door. Obfuscated backdoor? Sure, but the key is still in the backyard, anyone can find it and use it.
I wish encryption was explained to people in simple terms in the media like keys outback or window left ajar, something that obviously let's people know that it isn't safe to weaken security (for only our gov't which is not possible) otherwise it is pointless.
What many seem to forget is that when you're accessing "all those secrets for national security", you're hacking other nations. But as far as our elected officials are concerned, that's ok, until we're hacked.
Then we can impose sanctions on those countries for following our lead.
Which is why deliberately compromising crypto is short sighted and dangerous.
At the moment the faustian bargain looks tempting: access all those secrets for national security. Until the whole compromised stack is exploited by a foreign power, and Mephistopheles will show up on the Senate floor demanding our soul. And the politicians will be clambering over each other to appear like they always thought it was a bad idea.