Julian Sanchez has a lot more on the administration's proposal to force Internet communications companies to reverse engineer their systems for breach by the U.S. government. Aside from being radical, there's reason to believe it wouldn't actually work:
One could argue that these are costs worth bearing if the government's plan had a prayer of actually working, but it doesn't. There are already a plethora of open-source encryption tools freely available on the Internet, which sophisticated terrorists and criminal enterprises will have even greater incentive to use once we've announced that the encryption built into communication services can't be trusted. That's a genie there's no way to rebottle.
Fortunately, law enforcement still has a recourse that makes it unnecessary to impose architectural mandates on tech companies or weaken the security of all our communications. They can get old-fashioned physical search warrants and bug the devices used by their suspects. Less convenient, to be sure, but with the advantage of not imposing massive economic and privacy costs on everyone who isn't a suspect.
There is one type of surveillance that genuinely would be rendered impractical by widespread use of secure communications, however. Known individual suspects can be targeted by other means, but if the government wanted to do wholesale surveillance, in which the whole communications stream is automatically analyzed and filtered by artificial intelligence software hunting for suspicious communications by unknown parties -- as several accounts have suggested the National Security Agency did under the warrantless wiretapping program authorized by President George W. Bush -- they really would need a back door at the system level. But while governments may consider it a bug when network architecture renders such sweeping surveillance infeasible, citizens should probably regard it as a feature.
As I wrote last week, there's also the option of simply basing the company elsewhere if they want to avoid the law.
