Going Dark - the 3 Percent Issue?

Last year there were 3,168 authorized wiretaps, according to the USG (https://www.uscourts.gov/statistics-reports/wiretap-report-2016). 1,551 wiretaps were approved by federal judges and 1,617 by state judges. 

• 68 of the federal wiretaps were reported as encrypted, of which 53 could not be decrypted (or 3 percent). 
• 57 of the state wiretaps were reported as encrypted, of which 48 could not be decrypted (or 2.9 percent). 
• Incidentally, 93 percent of wiretaps were of mobile devices (which I'm sure pleases FBI agents who no longer need to sit inside white panel vans for days on end watching the tape recorders….)

Now weigh the implications of this "Going Dark" problem for law enforcement (impacting 3 percent of all authorized wiretaps) against what happened last week when an attack took down multiple companies for several days. And that the next attack might take down an electric grid (ok, that already happened - Ukraine), hospitals (ok that also already happened - NHS in UK), a country (ok, already happened twice - Georgia and Estonia). Which of these should we be more worried about?

And then ask yourself, if you think "Going Dark" is a macro level problem like cybersecurity that impacts the country -- who do you trust with the keys to the encryption if a back door solution is adopted? Because someone has to have a second set of keys. And who will protect those keys from the bad guys (like the brokers who live in the shadows....) 

Closing thought from Warren Buffet - I don’t know that much about cyber, but I do think that’s the number one problem with mankind."