[djsumdog]

...Because criminals are going to use state-sanctioned encryption software with mandated backdoors?

Even if everything off the shelf and open source has some built-in escrow unlocking keys compiled in, hackers are just going to find those code paths and remove them. Encryption works because of certain mathematical principals and laws.

Backdoors will only let governments look at legitimately encrypted data and not anything made by criminals who know how technology works.

There's a bigger question here: what if the NSA or CIA or some other intelligence/defence organisation discovers a solution to solve some of these hard problems in polynomial time .. and then doesn't release that information so they can use it to spy.

In that situation you're going even further: you have agents who are literally holding back scientific research that could change the entire field of mathematics and human understanding, research that could advance number theory by orders of magnitude (a jump equal to that of going from the first flight Kitty Hawk to the Saturn 5 rocket), for limited political gain.

[betenoire]

That makes sense...

So "If encryption had a backdoor" is meaningless. It's really "If a given encryption implementation had a back door" and no one is making the criminals use certain algorithms.

thanks