A backdoor is a vulnerability that doesn't care who you are or what your purpose is or who pays you. If you found the backdoor it is open to you.
However hard the backdoor's security is, an insider recruited by Swedish intelligence (or Russia whatever the bogeyman du jour is) will leak the key at some point. Now all your "secure" shit can be accessed invisibly by Swedish hackers. By its very nature, the backdoor cannot easily be changed and its use cannot be detected.
A mundane example is the TSA keys. In addition to being leaked by greedy insiders making a quick buck, they've been leaked by accident several times. E.g. https://hackaday.com/2015/09/18/dear-tsa-this-is-why-you-sho... They are now public knowledge, and a backdoor into your luggage from anyone who cares enough to file up a key.
I don't know much about locks, but I wonder how it could ever be secure, even if they never leaked photos of the masterkeys. In principle, it should be possible to reverse-engineer the shape of the masterkey from any masterkey-compatible lock. Would it be practical to do this?
- You can make/buy them
- Luggage locks are all garbage anyway
Most mechanical locks are garbage and neither resistant to practical physical attacks nor at all pick resistant. Many are vulnerable to super-generic low-skill attacks like bump keys and comb picks.
Many electronic locks are garbage.
Smart locks are complete garbage.
See https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ for many practical examples.
We DON'T trust them. We have about as much say in what those agencies do as a random shop keeper in 1980's USSR does with the KGB.
If the democratic oversight fails and transparency suffers, then the outcome will be less than ideal. But the answer is hardly "remove law enforcement authorities from level x", surely it must be improved transparency and oversight?
Also, no agency can be trusted with a back door. Back doors are available for all actors or no actor. An NSA back door to encryption is also a back door used by an authoritarian regime. There are no "exclusive" back doors.
You can use this to argue that the FBI and parts of the DHS should still exist in some form, but the CIA, NSA and military intelligence agencies are not law enforcement.
For the citizenry, the only way to deal with this situation is to avoid storing data, and hardening their devices.
Law enforcement ends up having to rely more on undercover work and informants, as it used to in the past. The CIA and NSA end up getting less intelligence for the same budget, but conversely, spies who infiltrate the CIA, NSA, etc. get less bang for their buck, as well.
Basically saying you have no control is saying that the US is no democracy.
The thing you reference is just a cover story. It's plain as day to anyone paying attention who runs that country.
There is no party you can vote for that will stop the perpetual war or perpetual ubiquitous surveillance, despite a vast majority of people in the country being against both war and surveillance.
> A majority of voters say they are satisfied with the authority given to U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor Americans suspected of committing a crime, according to a poll released Thursday.
> Fifty-one percent of respondents in a recent Hill-HarrisX survey said the intelligence community has the "right amount of power" in determining who should be subject to government surveillance.
https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/433071-pol...
1) Despite Snowden, most Americans are not aware of the extent of the surveillance to which they are subjected.
2) Your first quoted paragraph mentions "suspected of committing a crime". This suggests to me that they were asked about targeted surveillance, that is, of criminal suspects. The issue is one of mass surveillance: the surveillance conducted of those who are not suspected of criminal activity.
Most people aren't okay with that, when informed of the full scope of that to which they are subjected.
If you look at polling on concerns about surveillance in general in 2015, it was pretty much an even split, with a slight majority who were concerned about surveillance.[0] A majority did say it was unacceptable to surveil American citizens, at 57%, with 40% saying it was acceptable - I would not call that a vast majority, though.
Even if somebody says they're against this sort of mass surveillance, that does not change anything unless people vote based on it. Like it or not, things like surveillance and war take a back seat to all the other issues voters care about, especially since those two are among the least likely to actually affect the individual voters in question. The result of this is that few Democrats are going to vote for Rand Paul or Ted Cruz just because they happen to position themselves against the NSA or war in Syria, and few Republicans are going to vote for Bernie Sanders based on the same, even if they have strong preferences against surveillance and war - and that's ignoring the fact that there are definitely people on the other side of these issues, who believe that pardoning Snowden and withdrawing from Afghanistan is bowing down to Russia or something.
Ultimately, people get the government they deserve.
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/03/16/americans-pr...