I would be keeping my hat on. They would have done it with the taxpayers' money but without their consent or even knowledge. They would then be withholding a major scientific breakthrough from the public that financed it. A scientific breakthrough that might have all sorts of applications that could make our lives better.
They would be exposing all the people that rely in strong cryptography to major risks. Including people that have done nothing illegal and helped fund their research.
And more importantly, they shouldn't be reading our emails to being with, independently of them being encrypted or not. That was never the deal, no democratic process ever gave them the right.
Paying some 22 year old deskjockey a couple mil to code a backdoor into an encryption app isn't a scientific breakthrough, it's just traditional spycraft. Using the weight of the US government to force Microsoft to code a backdoor into Bitlocker isn't a scientific breakthrough, it's the sort of things governments do.
They would be exposing all the people that rely in strong cryptography to major risks. Including people that have done nothing illegal and helped fund their research.
And more importantly, they shouldn't be reading our emails to being with, independently of them being encrypted or not. That was never the deal, no democratic process ever gave them the right.