Granny Weatherwax, clad in a long, woven black dress and pointy hat, grasping the Sceptre of Omnicide

Governmental backdoors: skeleton keys and fairy tales

The trouble with governments and cryptography is that they keep mistaking mathematics for magic. In Ankh-Morpork, this was the sort of thinking that once led the Wizards of Unseen University to try and regulate gravity, on the grounds that it was “inconvenient.” It ended, inevitably, in bruises. In our world, the same …

September 9, 2025 · 5 min