Five Eyes, a group consisting of the governments of the U.S. Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand are asking tech industry giants to install back doors in their encryption, making it easier to get a hold of encrypted communications of suspected bad actors.

Goliaths like Apple and Facebook have historically been reluctant to comply with such requests, citing consumer privacy concerns. Five Eyes has indicated that it in turn has developed something of a David mentality.

“Should governments continue to encounter impediments to lawful access to information necessary to aid the protection of the citizens of our countries, we may pursue technological, enforcement, legislative or other measures to achieve lawful access solutions,” the statement reads.

It might not all be huffing and puffing. There's a precedent for the U.S. government requiring communications companies to restructure the architecture of their networks to accommodate surveillance by law enforcement, one that trails all the way back to the now defunct space on your kitchen wall where once there hung a landline.

“We all accepted [that] if there was enough probable cause, if they followed the right procedures … there were circumstances where law enforcement could tap a phone,” said Lawrence Sommerfeld, partner at Alston & Bird and a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. “We understood that there were wiretaps used for legitimate law enforcement purposes overseen by a court for a limited time.”

But wiretaps don't work with social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. So the government has to do the next best thing: ask for the data. A report published by Facebook showed that, between July and December 2017, the company received a total of 32,742 requests for data from the U.S government. Exactly 94.5 percent of them were delivered via legal means, such as a search warrant, while the rest constituted an “emergency.”

Out of all the requests that were filed during that period, 85 percent were successful in excavating some kind of data. If a potential law was looking to bridge the gap to the remaining 15 percent, it could encounter resistance based on the nature of modern day network communication platforms.

“It's one thing to say, 'OK, we're going to wiretap.' You can listen in real time, you can record my conversations over the next 10 days. It is potentially another to say, 'I have a device and it has every text message, every email that I've done over years and, here, have it,'” Sommerfeld said.

In fact, in its 2017 ruling in Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court said that, because of the nature of modern day cellphone location records, known as cell-site location information (CSLI), their collection by law enforcement requires a search warrant under the Fourth Amendment.

There's also the Pandora's Box of it all to consider. Jay Kramer, partner in the New York office of Lewis Brisbois who spent 21 years as an agent and supervisory special at FBI, points out that the same encryption technology that creates barriers for law enforcement is also being used to protect classified intelligence and other highly sensitive information. A backdoor is great until the wrong person gets the key.

For that reason, he thinks the implementation of another law in the style of the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which required telephone companies to restructure their networks to accommodate wiretaps, is unlikely. Instead, Kramer foresees law enforcement having to refocus its efforts and double down on more—some might say analogue—investigative techniques.

“The focus on, let's say, human source development is going to take on greater importance, to have someone from inside the criminal organization tell you what is going on because they are motivated to do that, whatever those motivations might be,” Kramer said.

Following a terrorist attack in San Bernadino, the FBI paid professional hackers to crack the encryption on an iPhone after Apple refused. The challenges to that approach could be more of a practical nature than a legal one.

Even if agents could get the appropriate court orders, the investment of time and energy spent trying to penetrate any number of different operating systems on a case by case basis might be enough to discourage the technique as an ongoing practice. Kramer recalled the words of an acquaintance of his who teaches math at West Point.

“Her analogy was that, even if we did have that computing power, the heat generated by all of those computers running to solve the algorithm … would dry up all the oceans and we'd all die anyway,” Kramer said.