A Better Norm for Enforced Backdoors

This is the kind of joke you only can see in a Wonder Woman comic for what should be obvious reasons.

So various people in the government  think they can force a private American company to implement a backdoor in their product without a warrant. But they also say they haven't done this yet.

Part of the reason why is that doing classified work in non-classified environments comes with risk - i.e. part of the reason classification systems are effective is that people in the system have signed off on the idea. Threats of prosecution only go so far really as a preventative measure against leaks (as we are now hyper-aware?)

To wit, the other major reason is that as a matter of policy, forced backdoors are terrible in a way that is visibly obvious to anyone and everyone who has looked at them. The reason is that we want to claim a "Public Private Partnership" and that's a community wide thing, and this is a tiny community.

What everyone is going to expect with a public-private partnership is simple: Shared Risk. If you ask the Government if they're going to insure a company for the potential financial harm of any kind of operation, including a backdoor, they'll say "hell no!". But then why would they expect a corporation to go along with it? These sorts of covert operations are essentially financial hacks that tax corporations for governments not wanting to pay the up-front costs of doing R&D on offensive methods, and the companies know it.

The backdoors problem is the kind of equities issue that makes the VEP look like the tiny peanuts it is and it's one with an established norm that the US Government enforces, unlike almost every other area of cyber. Huawei, Kaspersky, and ZTE have all paid the price for being used by their host governments (allegedly). Look at what Kaspersky and Microsoft are saying when faced with this issue: "If asked, we will MOVE OUR ENTIRE COMPANY to another Nation State".

In other words, whoever is telling newspapers that enforced backdoors are even on the table is being highly irresponsible or doesn't understand the equities at stake.