Media is taking this an blowing this out of proportion. Are there backdoors to certain systems? Yes. Does the government want access to everything? Yes. Can they access everything? No.
This is why they ordered lavabit to give up info on snowden. They cant read the encryption or access it. Lavabit is not complying and the government is pissed. They dont have the access to everything as people think they do. There is nothing new in this story since everything first hit, however the media knows the more they hype it up, the higher the ratings.
The government hires hackers or "consultants". Big deal. They use they same backdoors to hack an email as someone on the outside would exploit. Email encryption is safe in the right setting (and some providers will claim they are secure when in fact they are not), however like Ive stated for years, even in that scenario its only as safe as the other party is. Example is if, your safe on your side 100%, you dont know how safe an secure the other party takes the info. Its amazing how many people have un-secure passwords, fall for email scams, etc. This is why I always state to go the extra mile and use false info, fake ids, etc.
In no way can the government crack every encryption in every case. Impossible. They wouldnt need to subpeona orders and send people to jail for contempt if they had this ability. Plus they would know about alot more going on in the world then they do. On that side, they have enquired to silent mail about access to high profile clients as well. If they really could crack the system, they wouldnt be asking for access, theyd just take it.
"However, Silent Circle CEO Michael Janke admitted to TechCrunch that the government was interested in some of the service's high-profile clients.
There are some very high-profile people on Silent Circle -- and I mean very targeted people -- as well as heads of state, human rights groups, reporters, special operations units from many countries. We wanted to be proactive because we knew USG [the U.S. government] would come after us due to the sheer amount of people who use us, let alone the highly targeted high-profile people."
Going forward with this is, it'll be interesting to see how many more US based email providers will shut down out of principal as lavabit and silent mail have, or how many will stay open and work with the government giving up their clients info and privacy.
"Lavabit founder Ladar Levinson also mentioned the U.S. government when noting why he closed his site, though his commentary on the matter was more strident than Janke's. "I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit," Levinson wrote"
