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Encryption Rights Community: Protecting Our Rights To Strongly Encrypt
Lauren Weinstein writes: Around the world, dictatorships and democracies alike are attempting to restrict access to strong encryption that governments cannot decrypt or bypass on demand. Firms providing strong encryption to protect their users — such as Google and Apple — are now being accused by government spokesmen of "aiding" terrorism by not making their users' communications available to law enforcement on demand. Increasingly, governments that have proven incapable of protecting their own systems from data thefts are calling for easily abused, technologically impractical government "backdoors" in commercial encryption that would put all private communications at extreme risk of attacks. This new G+ community will discuss means and methods to protect our rights related to encrypted communications, unfettered by government efforts to undermine our privacy in this context.
It should say, "Around the world, dictatorships and democracies with governments wanting to become dictatorships are attempting to restrict access to strong encryption that governments cannot decrypt or bypass on demand."
about six or seven years ago i used to go a lot further than that, but at the time people disregarded what i said as being completely outrageous. times change.... let me reiterate it by way of parallel example.
this sentence "Firms providing strong encryption to protect their users — such as Google and Apple — are now being accused by government spokesmen of "aiding" terrorism"
should read "Firms providing strong encryption to protect their users — such as Google and Apple — are now being accused by terrorist spokesmen...."
i believe it was joseph goebbels, hitler's right-hand man, who said that the way for a government to get what it wanted was to terrorise people by making them think that they were no longer safe in their own homes. that if they didn't cecede power to the goverment then someone who was beyond the ability of the government to control would possibly kill them in their own beds, or on their way to work, or would kill their children on the way to school.
this strategy is one that governments today are fully aware of (they saw how effective it was for stalin and hitler and mussolini after all), and they are quite happy to copy it. unfortunately, when people fully trust their governments and cecede all power to them, historically we've seen how quickly things can flip to become very very dangerous. the problem is that i don't see how, when power is ever so slowly eroded in small incremental steps, it is possible to reverse that situation for people's benefit, without a very large event occurring (such as a bloody riot or a civil war). maybe it's possible now, peacefully, with the internet the way it is, and with organisations like avaaz, al jazeera, 38degrees and more: i don't really know. should we have faith in people and the way the internet works, now?