| Its trivial and common to have one or more than one key that unlocks the actual key that is in fact used to decrypt data see LUKS the standard for full disk encryption on Linux for example. This trivially lets you change your passphrase without rewriting all your data on disk. It's also useful for recovering data that the user has forgotten their self set passphrase or wont share it in case of a hostile ex employee. Furthermore one can have multiple passphrases and revoke one if it is known to be compromised. For the governments concept on it see "key escrow" and the clipper chip fiasco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip Problems are legion and multifaceted. To put it briefly based on past actions no reasonable party would trust the US government to be respectful of their rights and privacy nor even competent enough to keep a secret. It would force the entire world of computer security to be shackled and standardized upon what an incompetent bureaucracy understands and it would be a disaster inside a year. If one recalls a lot of current woes with malware can be traced back to one of their geniuses that took home a hard drive full of tools and lost it all to the bad guys. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/us/nsa-hacking-tool-balti... If a golden key that unlocked everything in existence came into being it would be in the hands of state actors within 30 days and everywhere next year. It has always required monumental arrogance and profound lack of foresight to suggest we should backdoor all security for the benefit of the keystone cops and their current fearless leader Sergeant Shultz here. As the iconic tv character used to say "I know nothing. Nothing!!" |