Pres. Obama: NSA security backdoors are a bad idea

The headline is misleading. He didn't really say that. At least, not on purpose. As far as I know.

From 2 March 2015:

Exclusive: Obama sharply criticizes China's plans for new technology rules | Reuters:

In an interview with Reuters, Obama said he was concerned about Beijing's plans for a far-reaching counterterrorism law that would require technology firms to hand over encryption keys, the passcodes that help protect data, and install security "backdoors" in their systems to give Chinese authorities surveillance access.

Obama said the rules could also backfire on China.

"Those kinds of restrictive practices I think would ironically hurt the Chinese economy over the long term because I don’t think there is any U.S. or European firm, any international firm, that could credibly get away with that wholesale turning over of data, personal data, over to a government," he said.

From 24 February 2015, an exchange between Yahoo's Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos and NSA Director Mike Rogers, in which Mr. Stamos challenges the NSA's plan to ban working crypto:

Yahoo's security boss faces down NSA director over crypto ban - Boing Boing:

AS: [...] So, if we’re going to build defects/backdoors or golden master keys for the US government, do you believe we should do so — we have about 1.3 billion users around the world — should we do for the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Saudi Arabian government, the Israeli government, the French government? Which of those countries should we give backdoors to?

[...]

MR: I think we can work our way through this.

AS: I’m sure the Chinese and Russians are going to have the same opinion.

MR: I said I think we can work through this.

AS: Okay, nice to meet you. Thanks.