And you believe the NSA when you can't see the warrants, know who issued them, what they contain, etc.? How would we know they weren't tapping domestic communication? You wouldn't. Any whistleblowers would be roughed-up or locked-up... much like Thomas Drake.
I said that the judicial branch keeps the other branches is check. I didn't say that are completely effective or that their checks are sufficient. And I certainly didn't say that the NSA wasn't engaging in any domestic wiretapping.
The thing is that they can not bring the result of this warrantless wiretapping into court. But they probably don't want to.
From what I've seen the FBI is a lot more vocal in complaining about the impact of encryption because their mandate involves bringing cases to court so they want a formalized, legitimate way of breaking encryption when they have warrants. They would also love to have the dragnet that the NSA has to know who to watch, and I don't know to what extent they do, but the bigger difference that I see is that the NSA is not interested in launching court battles (any more) whereas that is the primary endgame for the FBI.
The problem of course is that an encryption system which can be broken in a formalized way is open to the possibility of being broken by the wrong people. You can't have your cake and eat it too by having strong encryption that can be broken by the "right" people because there is no way to theoretically describe who the "right" people are. The encryption has to work the same for everyone.
Like all big issues in society there are competing rights; the need for law enforcement bumps up against the freedom of the individual. I believe that we are comfortable enough pushing this balance more heavily towards the freedom of the individual in America that a policy of embracing strong encryption is in the best interests of everyone, but I am aware that I don't have as much knowledge about this issue as some others.
You can have an encryption system that can only be broken by the 'right' people. We already have crypto systems where any 1 of n people can decrypt the message. If you embed a public key into the algorithm, then only the algorithm's designers would know the private key needed for decryption.
Doing this in a non-obvious way seems much more difficult, but if the NSA did have a weakness to DES, it could very possibly require knowing a secret key.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Andrews_Drake#2007_FBI_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_c...