Told to me by an associate who I consider to be a credible source on things like this. For reasons I don’t recall, we started talking about encryption – probably as the Snowden leaks started flowing.
He was working a very long time ago on a science related project for the government (not military related). At the time, the “Federal Intelligence” agencies convinced Congress to outlaw the export of effective encryption technology. The Ruskies might be able to keep us from reading their love notes to their mistresses!
So he was in South America and needed to login to servers inside the United States to do his work. Because of the encryption ban, he was not allowed to have encryption software on his computer. He tried to get an exemption to the ban, but it was rejected. After all, he wasn’t working on sensitive national security issues.
So he had to login to the US server from South America using Telnet, sending his login and password in clear text over connections that any number of governments would be able to monitor. Shockingly, his server in the US was quickly compromised. That security breach quickly escalated into unfriendly forces having access to extremely sensitive computers on the same network back in the US.
If you force encryption to have a back door, you better hope another Snowden – motivated by more sinister reasons – never gets access to the magic key to the backdoor.
Using the Rubio “classified information” standard about leaks, when Carly Fiorina stated as a fact that the US government had never asked anyone in the Technology Sector to allow access to encryption technologies, how does she know that? Surely discussions that sensitive would be classified.
“They do not need to be forced,” Fiorina said. “They need to be asked to bring the best and brightest, the most recent technology to the table.”
[Ed: the non-citizen immigrants from Asia?]“I was asked as a CEO, I complied happily, and they will as well,” the former HP CEO said, referencing her time as the chair of a CIA civilian tech advisory board during the last Bush administration. “But they have not been asked.”
More details: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States