Encryption Flip Side

The Intelligence services and law enforcement agencies of our country have a job to do and we can all understand why they need to be able to do it.  But, from time to time, we might want to look at what that job is.  Part of it is staying ahead of technology and coming up with ways to defeat whatever protections terrorists and spies can come up with.

For all of my government life, I heard the encryption argument from the people who want to be able to get into another person's mail or files and discover what they have been up to.  They have good reasons for doing it, of course, like counter terrorism or undoing spies who are trying to do us harm.  Most of the time, that argument was self-serving, even if it was made for the right reasons.

In 1991, Phil Zimmermann introduced an idea he called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP).  He was investigated as a criminal for publishing the code in a book, and harassed for several years before the code was finally accepted.  Anyone can have PGP now.  What Zimmermann had to go through was the same type of thing our own technical industries are facing now with the discussion of making back doors to code to allow government access to the internal communications of anyone using their products.  Apple, Google and the rest, built encryption in and they cannot get at the communications of users of products using that kind of protection.  Even under a warrant, Apple and Google say they cannot get anything that is not encrypted and thus not very useful.

The natural reaction is to say "give us a back door".  We promise we will protect it and make sure nobody can use it but us.  We will only use it when it is required for some good purpose.  That is the wrong approach to take.  What Apple and Google did was the right thing.  They are protecting our data from interception by anyone, good guy or bad, because so many bad guys were stealing almost everything they could get their hands on.  It was about time they did something about it.  We should be glad they did.  The unintended consequence is that bad guys can use the same encryption to continue their work.

I don't like terrorists very much and would like to see them caught or killed.  But, what the governments of the world should be focused on is finding the technology that allows them to keep up, not undoing the technology we have to protect our own information.  That confusing bit of logic that allows them to make the argument that the industry should give them an easy way out is symptomatic of something else - laziness.  Find a way, and do your job.