Both Bernie and Hillary have been vague about their stance on having encryption backdoors, almost to the point of implicitly supporting encryption backdoors but not wanting to outright say it. Bernie's message about privacy isn't necessarily incompatible with encryption backdoors, at least not through the lens of political speak and all of its half-truths.

disclaimer: bernie supporter, and not a supporter of encryption backdoors

Encryption policy will ultimately be resolved by the legislature and not the president. The only presidential candidate who was on the record as explicitly against encryption backdoors was Rand Paul, but that ship has sailed:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/13/rand-paul-sa...

> “The head of the FBI came out with this recently. He says, ‘Oh, we’re going to ban encryption.’ And it’s like we want to build a backdoor into Facebook and a backdoor into Apple products,” the presidential hopeful said at the Yahoo Digital Democracy conference this week. “A backdoor means that the government can look at your stuff, look at your information, your conversations. … The problem is, is that the moment you build an opening — and I’m not an expert on coding or anything — but the moment you give a vulnerability to a code that someone can get into your source code, not only can the government, but so can your enemies, so can foreign governments.”

The issue is that the NSA, FBI, etc are essentially controlled by the President. These groups have and will continue to have extremely creative interpretations of the law, to the point of essentially ignoring it and doing whatever the fuck they want without repercussion. Legislature can pass whatever they want, but three letter orgs will continue to have secret courts, secret laws, and secret operations that operate outside established public law.

The first sentence is a very naive point of view. Most people argue that it is the other way round. People who worked there.

The directors for these agencies are appointed by the President. He hand picks them, and has the ability to fire them with adequate cause, of which there is recent precedent. I am not sure how you can argue they are not controlled by the President, unless you want to try some sort of secret-blackmail theory.

However, it isn't surprising that the FBI or similar agencies are full of egocentric people who believe they hold the power in the relationship. It seems to attract these types of people, really.