In fact, the government has actually won this fight before—secretly.
Throughout 2015, U.S. politicians and law enforcement officials such as FBI director James Comey have publicly lobbied for the insertion of cryptographic “backdoors” into software and hardware to allow law enforcement agencies to bypass authentication and access a suspect’s data surreptitiously. Cybersecurity experts have unanimously condemned the idea, pointing out that such backdoors would fundamentally undermine encryption and could exploited by criminals, among other issues. While a legal mandate or public agreement would be needed to allow evidence obtained via backdoors to be admissible in court, the NSA has long attempted—and occasionally succeeded—in placing backdoors for covert activities.
One of the most important developments in cryptography was the Enigma machine, famously used to encode Nazi communications during World War II. For years, rumors have persisted that the NSA (then SSA) and their British counterparts in the Government Communications Headquarters collaborated with the Enigma’s manufacturer, Crypto AG, to place backdoors into Enigma machines provided to certain countries after World War II. Crypto AG has repeatedly denied the allegations, and in 2015 the BBC sifted through 52,000 pages of declassified NSA documents to find the truth.
The investigation revealed that while no backdoors were placed in the machines, there was a “gentlemen’s agreement” that Crypto AG would keep American and British intelligence appraised of “the technical specifications of different machines and which countries were buying which ones,” allowing analysts to decrypt messages much more quickly. Consider it a security “doggy-door.”