[dikaiosune]

US Gov isn't a monolith. Interesting to think about in light of all of the recent articles on HN about the challenges of building out microservices or SOA. Just with human action instead of 10gig fiber, eventual consistency takes a lot longer, if it ever happens.

[murbard2]

You're right, it's not. More attack surface area.

Sure, you could in theory have a highly distributed system with multiple keys, but then you can't use it day to day for monitoring communications, which is the whole purpose of the backdoor.

The government may be able to keep the nuclear codes safe in such a fashion, but it wouldn't if ten different government agencies wanted to use them on a daily basis.

[tsotha]

Security is a hard thing for large organizations. Much of the time they simply don't have the expertise they need to know what their vulnerabilities are.