Following the leaks by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden that began in the summer of 2013, encryption and encryption backdoors have become hot-button topics of discussion.

That's because many companies, including Apple and Google, have been going out of their way to encrypt products after the public learned that the US had embarked on a massive, legally and morally suspect electronic spying operation against its own citizenry and the global community at large. Fearing encryption is undermining their surveillance capabilities, government officials from the US and across the pond in the UK have been increasingly decrying encryption or at least demanding a government-accessible backdoor to unlock said encryption.

One of the latest rants against encryption occurred Wednesday.

FBI Director James Comey complained to a Senate panel that companies, like Apple, are building products in which the keys necessary to decrypt communications and electronic devices are being left "solely in the hands of the end user." In a joint statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey and a Justice Department official essentially told lawmakers that we're all doomed unless companies bake encryption backdoors into their products to allow for lawful access by the government. Comey said the problems backdoor-less encryption presents to law enforcement "are grave, growing, and extremely complex."

But that doomsday scenario was tame compared to what New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr told the panel. He said his office handles some 100,000 criminal cases a year spanning murder, rape, robbery, identity theft, financial fraud, and terrorism.

He said Apple was evil for baking encryption into iOS 8 and that a law enforcement backdoor should be allowed. He told the committee that a jailhouse recording of two inmates had one of them saying that iOS 8's default encryption was a "gift from God."

Here's what Vance said (PDF) next:

This defendant’s appreciation of the safety that the iOS 8 operating system afforded him is surely shared by criminal defendants in every jurisdiction in America charged with all manner of crimes, including rape, kidnapping, robbery, promotion of child pornography, larceny, and presumably by those interested in committing acts of terrorism. Criminal defendants across the nation are the principal beneficiaries of iOS 8, and the safety of all American communities is imperiled by it.

Apple's chief, Tim Cook, has been railing against calls for government backdoors into encrypted products.

Further Reading Tech sector tells Obama encryption backdoors “undermine human rights”

"Now, we have a deep respect for law enforcement, and we work together with them in many areas, but on this issue we disagree. So let me be crystal clear—weakening encryption, or taking it away, harms good people that are using it for the right reasons. And ultimately, I believe it has a chilling effect on our First Amendment rights and undermines our country’s founding principles," Cook said at a Washington event last month.

As it now stands, nobody in Congress has actually proposed a law mandating these backdoors. Instead, politicians are trying to guilt the tech sector into complying. And President Barack Obama's administration is mulling an encryption policy and could ask Congress for backdoor legislation in the coming months.

For now, US-based companies are not required to provide the government with backdoors into their wares. The law surrounding this issue is the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994. CALEA requires telcos to make their phone networks amenable to wiretaps, but it doesn't apply to phone hardware or most other communication services.