alt Hacker News> If you're a US company building an app/device/etc. such that an intelligence agency like the CIA or FBI would want access to the data in that product which is normally secured, then they're not going to try to sneak it in there without your development team knowing. They're going to have a meeting with the owners of the company and say, "hey, we'd really like you to implement this backdoor for us, and in return we won't cause you in problems."
And then you say, loudly and publicly, "all the source code of our software is public, and our binaries use binary transparency so it's not possible for us to build a binary that doesn't match the source, and people will rapidly find this in our source code at which point we go out of business and you stop having a product to backdoor in the first place".
(And you move out of the US.)
And since this is a foreseeable future, you should start acting now to prepare for that future.
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> And then you say, loudly and publicly, "all the source code of our software is public, and our binaries use binary transparency so it's not possible for us to build a binary that doesn't match the source, and people will rapidly find this in our source code at which point we go out of business and you stop having a product to backdoor in the first place".
> (And you move out of the US.)
And then everybody claps.
Name me a software or hardware company—one big enough that the US government would actually care to force them to add a backdoor—that would be willing to give up the US market? The only one that's shown the least bit of backbone is Apple, and while I like them and appreciate what they've done in that vein so far, they're never going to move to open source software running their stuff, and they're pretty well embedded in the US, and very, very unlikely to try to move regardless of the headwinds there.
I'm fully with you that this would be a wise and moral thing to do, but frankly, our tech companies are neither wise nor moral. They are self-serving, greedy, and many of them have wanted to become the neofeudal overlords of a new order since before Trump started smashing the old one.
With laws like Chatcontrol and all, other jurisdictions are not necessarily any better.
In fact, we're increasingly seeing a desire to build the "backdoor" directly into the software, e.g. mandatory age verification, client-side scanning, etc.