[Agingcoder]

Well, hostile state actors can ( and do!) already wiretap lots of things in the physical world, in theory wiretapping / surveillance is only possible for governments etc. And the NSA semi-successfully inserted a backdoor through carefully chosen elliptic curves a few years ago ( DUAL_EC_DRBG ) by convincing folks to use a weak PRNG.

I’d say that the problem isn’t so much related to encryption, but to the fact that anything digital can be industrialized very quickly, and that the ‘if it goes wrong’ scenario can go really wrong if ( and when) your backdoor falls into the wrong hands.

From a lawmaker’s perspective, it’s just a different kind of risk, which they may or may not be assessing properly. In some ways I see it as closer to people misunderstanding how easy and how bad it is to lose large amounts of data : it’s not related to the inner workings of computers , but rather to the leverage that computers provide. The same is true with weak crypto : everything is great until suddenly everything is in the clear all at the same time, and read by people you don’t want.