It's possible that they were talking about CALEA, which has some wiretap capability mandates on hardware (and associated technical standards).
If I had the choice between communicating over CALEA-compliant or non-CALEA-compliant infrastructure, I would far prefer the latter, but these particular backdoors aren't required to operate in an automatic, unattended, or surreptitious way (though some implementations might well have bugs that allow them to do so).
Comments
It's possible that they were talking about CALEA, which has some wiretap capability mandates on hardware (and associated technical standards).
If I had the choice between communicating over CALEA-compliant or non-CALEA-compliant infrastructure, I would far prefer the latter, but these particular backdoors aren't required to operate in an automatic, unattended, or surreptitious way (though some implementations might well have bugs that allow them to do so).