I'm an old man myself so i'm going to try to break this down without the hyperbole.Again, you are exactly right in what a backdoor is, and you turn right around and misuse it in application. The government is not asking for backdoors even though that is what other people call it in the media reports. The government is asking for valid, legitimate access. Calling it a backdoor is just a way to make their requests sound unreasonable.
"Sir, I have a warrant here to search your house, would you please unlock the front door and come with me while I conduct a search for this and that?"
"No you can't sneak in the backdoor and rummage through my entire house looking for whatever you can find to pin a charge on me!"
"Umm, Sir, the warrant only authorizes me to look through your bedroom for a 9mm handgun, your wife says that you shot the TV with it and you always keep it on your night stand"
"Oh no, I'm not going to let you sneak in the backdoor and rummage through my entire house looking for whatever you can find to pin a charge on me!"
This is what the backdoor argument sounds like to me.
And you don't need to explain to me what encryption's purpose is. I was probably using it long before you were born.
Why do you guys keep insisting that the only way to support government access to data is via a backdoor? Why can't you ever admit that it would be perfectly easy to engineer secure access to data. So stupid.
1. the government doesn't make you add a lock that they have a master key to to your door. You let them in or they break the door down. You don't give them a key to come in whenever they want.
2. by the same token they can already issue a warrant and take the physical device your using and do whatever they want with it.
3. Its being called a backdoor because the original time this was proposed in the 90s the intent was to allow the government a master crypto key to decrypt whatever they wanted on the fly.
4. if it is done in this manner, there is ZERO chance the key doesn't leak the keys the government uses for high security crap have already been leaked several times causing them all to be re issued and all past data to be vulnerable. I know for a fact on this because i had to do 4 re keys over the course of 8 years because of this, and this is the tamest of the crap that has happened.
5. There is no actual authority the feds in particular can use to limit personal use of encryption. It can only be limited in commerce. In other words they can make apples native crap be weak, but you can't actually be prevented from doing whatever you want as long as you don't engage in commerce. Even when encryption was considered a national security issue in the past it only involved export of technology, not that you couldn't use it yourself.
I know this breakdown isn't clean but people should be concerned about this. It has been demonstrated time and time again the fisa courts can be abused to get just about whatever with a few exceptions they want and that intelligence services employees have abused their positions for personal and political gains and that doesn't even include actual political appointees abusing the system. I always break it down like this: If i knew a person wanted to harm me would i be willing to give them this power.