Despite rhetoric, DoJ, NSA still seek backdoors

The U.S. took its encryption argument international last week, with Attorney General Loretta Lynch telling the World Economic forum that it doesn’t want to put security backdoors into encrypted communications, it just wants to vendors and service providers to decrypt when ordered to by a court.

That ignores that facts that vendors and providers can’t decrypt unless there is a backdoor of some sort, and that any backdoor undermines the security and therefore the value of encryption.

It’s a case of the Department of Justice – via Lynch and FBI Director James Comey – trying to steer clear, at least technically, of demanding backdoors, but it’s all a semantic game. Earlier, Comey stopped using the term backdoor and asked for front-door access to decryption instead. Backdoor had become too much of a flashpoint, even though a front-door is exactly the same as a backdoor from a technology standpoint.

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