By design, encryption keeps secrets secret. Almost all the time, this is great, but it's vexing for politicians trying to campaign on their anti-terrorism credentials.

In Saturday's Democratic debate, frontrunner and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for a "Manhattan-like project" to get around encryption technology when moderator Martha Raddatz asked Clinton whether she would force Apple CEO Tim Cook to give law enforcement a key to encrypted communications on Apple devices.

This was Clinton's response:

I would not want to go to that point. I would hope that, given the extraordinary capacities that the tech community has and the legitimate needs and questions from law enforcement, that there could be a Manhattan-like project, something that would bring the government and the tech communities together to see they're not adversaries, they've got to be partners.

It doesn't do anybody any good if terrorists can move toward encrypted communication that no law enforcement agency can break into before or after. There must be some way. I don't know enough about the technology,Martha, to be able to say what it is, but I have a lot of confidence in our tech experts.

And maybe the back door is the wrong door, and I understand what Apple and others are saying about that. But I also understand, when a law enforcement official charged with the responsibility of preventing attacks -- to go back to our early questions, how do we prevent attacks -- well, if we can't know what someone is planning, we are going to have to rely on the neighbor or, you know, the member of the mosque or the teacher, somebody to see something.

The Manhattan Project was one of the more remarkable works of human science and engineering, and also one of the deadliest. Undertaken during World War II, and created in part at the urging of Albert Einstein, the genius physicists working within the Manhattan Project theorized, designed, and created in the space of just a few years the first-ever working atomic weapons. Used against Japan in August of 1945, the first two atomic weapons killed at least 200,000 people, mostly civilians and likely killed more. Given that less than 3,500 Americans have died of terrorism this century (that includes the death toll from 9/11 attacks), a Manhattan Project is a wholly inappropriate metaphor.