In one of the most public confrontations of a top U.S. intelligence official by Silicon Valley in recent years, a senior Yahoo Inc. official peppered the National Security Agency director, Adm. Mike Rogers, at a conference on Monday over digital spying.

The exchange came during a question and answer session at a daylong summit on cybersecurity hosted by the think tank New America. Mr. Rogers spent an hour at the conference answering a range of questions about his agencys practices and the global cyber threat.

The tense exchange began when Alex Stamos, Yahoos chief information-security officer, asked Mr. Rogers if Yahoo should acquiesce to requests from Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, France and other countries to build a backdoor in some of their systems that would allow the countries to spy on certain users.

It sounds like you agree with [Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James] Comey that we should be building defects into the encryption in our products so that the US government can decrypt, Mr. Stamos said, according to a transcript of the exchange compiled by the Just Security blog.

That would be your characterization, Mr. Rogers said, cutting the Yahoo executive off.

Mr. Stamos was trying to argue that if Yahoo gave the NSA access to this information, other countries could try and compel the company to provide the same access to data.

Mr. Rogers said he believed that it is achievable to create a legal framework that allows the NSA to access encrypted information without upending corporate security programs.He declined to provide more details.

Well, do you believe we should build backdoors for other countries? Mr. Stamos continued?

My position is hey, look, I think that were lying that this isnt technically feasible, Mr. Rogers replied.

He said the framework would have to be worked out ahead of time by policy makers not the NSA.

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Yahoo Executive Confronts NSA Director Over Backdoors