Is encryption a fundamental right? Should citizens of the US be allowed to have a technology that completely locks out the government? How important of an issue is encryption to you? Does it affect who you support politically? financially? socially? Should it? In the struggle between national security and personal privacy, who will win? Are you resigned to a particular future or will you fight for it?
The right to encryption is as much a fundamental right as the right to privacy, and possibly much more. Do we truly have privacy when we can’t encrypt our data, so no one else can access them? Especially in a time when all our data and personal exchanges are logged on our devices, when our devices can be easily unlocked and decrypted by the government or other people and organizations, a lot is at stake.
In authoritarian regimes, our freedom of speech and freedom of thought could be compromised; when dealing with hackers, our rights to properties is at risk; even in the U.S., the fifth amendment right that citizens have, that people cannot be compelled to testify against themselves, is in danger. If citizens don’t have a means to keep data truly to themselves only, if the U.S. government one day exerts more executive power than today, or if some authoritarian figure is elected president (see pre-WWII Germany), everyone’s rights will be in jeopardy.
The future looks even bleaker if we consider other parties that may exploit a lack of encryption. In a world where anyone performing a man-in-the-middle attack can change contents of any communications, what can we believe?
And as we discuss the right to encryption, stripping encryption from consumer devices doesn’t boost national security either. For organized extremist organizations, even with backdoors to all devices, there are other approaches for them to secure their own communications. The existence of non-centralized encryption methods, peer-to-peer PGP encryption of emails and distributed bridge relays, show that any attempt to control encryption is futile. Encryption is not a threat to national security; external enemies are. The ongoing battle around encryption is the government missing its target.
So the lack of education on the subject of encryption from the government is shocking, as is a general disrespect of expertise on this matter from the government’s end. There’s no question whether something with such widespread, looming consequences should affect one’s political alignment; why wouldn’t it?
Why wouldn’t anyone fight these misinformed attempts?
Conundrum 