I don't get what's so bad about backdoors. With the exception of end-to-end encryption, your chat/communication provider already has the keys. What's so much more hackable about the government having a copy?
When a service provider's cooperation is required, it can:
- Turn away informal requests and say, "come back with a court order"
- Appeal subpoenas it feels are unreasonable
- Return exactly as much data as required by court order (search warrants are supposed to be narrow; overly broad search warrants are vulnerable to defense lawyers)
- Fall on its sword if it feels it has been required to do something extremely unethical and legal channels for objection have been exhausted (Lavabit)
While a service provider cannot legally resist government writ large, it can limit its disclosures to what the judiciary actually requires, rather than what police want. (At least in criminal law, these are actually meaningfully different.)
A service provider that has been backdoored is giving every cop/analyst/whatever far more than they are legally entitled to.
Two reasons - first even if you're okay with the government having a copy (many are not), it's impossible to ensure that only authorized parties will have access to that backdoor.
Having it there in the first place is a security hole, in other words.
Second, having a backdoor in place allows for extralegal shenanigans (which is what everyone is hacked off at the NSA for).
At least as is, they have to get a court order compelling the communication provider to hand over data.
And therein lies one of the big issues. As Apple is discovering, implementing good practice security with end-to-end encryption or similar untrusted-middleman setups is being made illegal.
They also want backdoors for end-to-end encryption. Remember the Clipper Chip? Cypherpunks won that round with Silicon Valley support. But now that we're at cyberwar, all bets are off.
