I think people take the FBI or CIA too literally. I imagine they don't need to talk to owners and it's probably not even ideal. It might just be easier to get plants in the organization.

I would imagine most big companies, like Microsoft, have dozens of CIA and FBI plants in their organizations. Agents who are legitimate software engineers, tasked with acquiring intelligence and undermining security.

> If you're a US company building an app/device/etc. such that an intelligence agency like the CIA or FBI would want access to the data in that product which is normally secured, then they're not going to try to sneak it in there without your development team knowing. They're going to have a meeting with the owners of the company and say, "hey, we'd really like you to implement this backdoor for us, and in return we won't cause you in problems."

And then you say, loudly and publicly, "all the source code of our software is public, and our binaries use binary transparency so it's not possible for us to build a binary that doesn't match the source, and people will rapidly find this in our source code at which point we go out of business and you stop having a product to backdoor in the first place".

(And you move out of the US.)

And since this is a foreseeable future, you should start acting now to prepare for that future.