If you want a more detailed description, go to Wikipedia and read up on the difference between public and private key cryptography. What politicians are arguing for isn&#x27;t just adding another private key to private key cryptosystems; a backdoor eliminates the biggest advantage of public key systems by adding a private key that could crack any of them. Once you add that, it&#x27;s just a matter of time before someone cracks it.<p>Really, it&#x27;s inevitable. Someone doesn&#x27;t even need to crack it, you just need a single careless or corrupt government employee to compromise the whole system for everyone for all time. People are proposing adding a single point of failure to systems whose usefulness is currently defined by their lack of such a single point of failure. Put that in there and we may as well all go back to using DES for everything.