The US government tried to mandate a backdoor in every phone with the Clipper Chip — and the NSA key escrow system was cracked

In 1993, the Clinton administration proposed something that would have fundamentally changed how Americans could communicate in private. The plan was called the Clipper Chip, and it represented one of the most direct attempts by the U.S. government to build surveillance into consumer technology at a mandatory, structural level.

The idea seemed straightforward enough from the government's perspective. Every telephone would be required to contain an NSA-designed encryption chip called the MYK-78. This chip would scramble conversations so thoroughly that no one—not criminals, not foreign adversaries—could listen in. The catch was that the government would always be able to listen in. The NSA held special "keys" that could unlock any conversation, stored in an "escrow" system overseen by two separate agencies. Law enforcement could obtain a warrant, retrieve the keys, and decrypt any call they wanted.

Supporters of the program framed it as a necessary balance. Privacy advocates and the technology industry were told that this was the only way to have strong encryption in consumer products without completely tying the hands of law enforcement. The algorithm powering the system, called Skipjack, was kept classified—meaning independent security experts couldn't examine it for flaws. The government essentially asked the public to trust that the system was secure simply because the NSA said so.

The skepticism was immediate and widespread. If the government had a master key, the argument went, what prevented criminals from obtaining that key? What protected it from being misused? These weren't paranoid questions—they were basic security engineering questions that should have been answerable with evidence.

In 1994, cryptographer Matt Blaze set out to answer them. What he discovered was devastating to the program's credibility. Blaze found a critical flaw in the escrow system's design. The problem wasn't with Skipjack itself, but with how the key escrow mechanism was implemented. He demonstrated that someone could actually remove the escrow information from the chip while keeping the encryption fully functional. The backdoor that was supposed to be unbreakable could be bypassed entirely. Blaze published his findings in a paper titled "Protocol Failure in the Escrowed Encryption Standard," and the security research community confirmed his work.