Invading a user’s privacy was a bad idea when it was proposed in the 1990s via the ill-conceived Clipper chip, and it’s a bad idea now, no matter what name it’s given this time.

Back in the days of the Clinton administration, the government wanted to force electronics manufacturers to install a chip that would allow the government (with a court order, supposedly) to have unfettered access to any and all encrypted data on the device. It proposed to do this via a scheme called “key escrow,” wherein the cryptographic keys to the kingdom were stored by a presumably trusted escrow service and only turned over to the government upon lawful request in the form of a subpoena. After a long battle, the Clipper chip program was shot down, largely because the public saw it as too intrusive.

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