Last week the Obama Administration announced that it would be shortly submitting legislation intended to force providers of all kinds of digital communication services (mail, voice, chat, Twitter, etc.) to install back doors in their services to allow government monitoring of all encrypted digital communication.  No explicit details were given of how this is going to work, nor has the actual legislation yet been introduced.  Hopefully it never will, because it simply won’t work.

It’s not that such technical back doors can’t be written (they can), nor is it even so onerous to force communication providers to change all their software since these services are rewritten often anyway.  The problem is that such back doors will […]