Study: criminals would be able to easily avoid any mandatory backdoors by switching to one of many encryption methods developed outside US
Encryption Is Worldwide: Yet Another Reason Why a US Ban Makes No Sense — If a handful of lawmakers in the US and abroad have their way …
Context & Ripple Effects
The backdoor fight has cycled through the same argument for a decade: in 2015, Apple, Google, and leading cryptologists pressed Obama to reject device backdoors while a newly uncovered US cybersecurity report found encryption vital to protecting private data — directly contradicting David Cameron's proposal that same month (at odds with Cameron's plan). A U.N. report framed the same issue as a human-rights matter, arguing backdoors undermine rather than protect rights (the U.N.'s position).
What changed by this study is the empirical grounding of the substitution argument: the technical claim that a US-only mandate is porous is no longer just industry advocacy but documented research. It lands amid renewed pressure — the Five Eyes plus India and Japan jointly calling for end-to-end backdoors in 2020 (that joint call), and the UK's order compelling Apple to build one, which prompted calls for Congress to bar US companies from providing backdoors to any government (the UK-Apple order).
First-order effects
- US lawmakers weighing a backdoor mandate lose their core technical premise: the study shows compliance would only displace criminal traffic to the many encryption methods developed outside US jurisdiction, leaving American users with weaker protection.
- US tech companies face the worst of both positions — compelled to weaken products whose security advantage evaporates the moment targets switch to foreign alternatives.
Second-order effects
- Law-enforcement agencies pressing for access gain little actionable capability, since the subjects they most want to reach are precisely the ones the study says will migrate to non-US encryption — shifting investigative burden toward methods no US authority can compel.
- Foreign-developed encryption tools become the de facto standard for anyone with something to hide, handing a credibility and market advantage to jurisdictions that refuse backdoor mandates.
Third-order effects
- If unilateral national mandates keep failing on substitution grounds, the pressure moves toward either coordinated multi-government demands (the Five Eyes-plus model already visible in the coverage) or legislative countermeasures like prohibiting US firms from building backdoors for any country — the structure the UK-Apple episode pushed onto Congress's agenda.
- The recurring pattern across a decade of reports, letters, and orders suggests encryption policy settles into permanent jurisdictional arbitrage: every national weakening attempt strengthens the case for keeping strong encryption as a global default, a conclusion the U.N. human-rights framing anticipated.
The trend: National backdoor mandates are being undermined by the borderless nature of cryptography, pushing governments toward coordinated international demands even as each unilateral attempt strengthens the case for default strong encryption.