General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Destroying the Right to Be Left Alone [View all]Any OS can provide a backdoor which can be used to monitor the encryption process. And it doesn't have to be a commercial OS - evil-government-programer-6347 can submit code to an open source OS introducing such a backdoor via a non-obvious exploit.
Anyway, that backdoor doesn't mean they can decrypt anything ever encrypted by it. It means they could try to capture keys or unencrypted data.
The problem with your argument is we're talking about a 4th/5th amendment protected system, and they would not be able to activate such backdoors without a court order - even Snowden hasn't managed to leak anything that shows violation of that. Though there are lots of people claiming he did without bothering to point to any evidence - it would get in the way of the story they want to tell.
And even if such an order was issued, it would only work on newly encrypted data. Unless you screw up your key management, it wouldn't work to decrypt old data.
Lastly, yours is still an "NSA can do magic" post. Got any links?