On mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications by the distinguished committee of computer scientists,
Harold Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven M. Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matthew Blaze,
Whitfield Diffie, John Gilmore, Matthew Green, Peter G. Neumann, Susan Landau,
Ronald L. Rivest, Jeffrey I. Schiller, Bruce Schneier, Michael Specter, Daniel J. Weitzner. pdf 
The encryption debate has left both sides bitterly divided and in fighting mode. The group of cryptographers deliberately issued its report a day before James B. Comey Jr., the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Sally Quillian Yates, the deputy attorney general at the Justice Department, are scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the concerns that they and other government agencies have that encryption technologies will prevent them from effectively doing their jobs. nyt
quotes
We examine whether it is technically and operationally feasible to meet law enforcement’s call for exceptional access without causing large-scale security vulnerabilities.
We take no issue here with law enforcement’s desire to execute lawful surveillance orders when they meet the requirements of human rights and the rule of law.
Our strong recommendation is that anyone proposing regulations should first present concrete technical requirements, which industry, academics, and the public can analyze for technical weaknesses and for hidden costs.
First, providing exceptional access to communications would force a U-turn from the best practices now being deployed to make the Internet more secure. These practices include forward secrecy — where decryption keys are deleted immediately after use, so that stealing the encryption key used by a communications server would not compromise earlier or later communications.
Second, building in exceptional access would substantially increase system complexity. Security researchers inside and outside government agree that complexity is the enemy of security — every new feature can interact with others to create vulnerabilities.
Third, exceptional access would create concentrated targets that could attract bad actors. Security credentials that unlock the data would have to be retained by the platform provider, law enforcement agencies, or some other trusted third party.
The greatest impediment to exceptional access may be jurisdiction. Building in exceptional access would be risky enough even if only one law enforcement agency in the world had it. But this is not only a US issue. China has already intimated that it may require exceptional access.
Finally, we set out in detail the questions for which policymakers should require answers if the demand for exceptional access is to be taken seriously
A proposal to regulate encryption and guarantee law enforcement access centrally feels rather like a proposal to require that all airplanes can be controlled from the ground. While this might be desirable in the case of a hijacking or a suicidal pilot, a clear-eyed assessment of how one could design such a capability reveals enormous technical and operational complexity, international scope, large costs, and massive risks — so much so that such proposals, though occasionally made, are not really taken seriously.
.
One question the authors ask, Would anonymous communications, widely recognized as vital to democratic societies, be allowed?
Wiki's cooperation by proliferation model will be touched by SSL/TLS in one direction and ICANN privacy policies in another. Exceptional access could be a third.