- Jan 8, 2011
- 22,361
"UK Prime Minister David Cameron really hates the internet. He’s long been willing to mention companies like Snapchat and Whatsapp as real security threats to the nation. He’s declared a semi-official war on porn, which has of course been spectacularly unsuccessful and has already resulted in countless abuses in the name of conservative prudery and outright censorship. And now, he is gearing up to begin one of the most fundamental attacks on the internet that it’s possible to imagine: he wants to ban encryption.
Now, he and his supporters wouldn’t frame it that way. The exceedingly reasonable-sounding question is whether, in Cameron’s own words, “we want to allow a means of communication between two people which even in extemis with a signed warrant from the home secretary personally that we cannot read.” This question contains the magic word, the cure-all that has always been able to break the back any real surveillance backlash: warrant. That’s why you will not find official British sources characterizing this new initiative as a ban on encryption; they say they still want you to have the encryption, just so long as they can break it whenever they want. This ability to be secure against everybody except the biggest and best-funded hackers in the world is a bit like the ability to turn invisible, but only while nobody’s looking.
In practice, this idea would mean that the country would legislate into existence software “backdoors” allowing the government to waltz through any commercially available means of encryption. The most obvious problem with this is that such backdoors present additional weaknesses that could be exploited by people other than the government themselves — will the government’s own servers be imperfectly encrypted in this way?"
NB: Please consider this thread about the "Ban of Encryption" and not based of UK Politics.
Quote from Forum Rules:
Now, he and his supporters wouldn’t frame it that way. The exceedingly reasonable-sounding question is whether, in Cameron’s own words, “we want to allow a means of communication between two people which even in extemis with a signed warrant from the home secretary personally that we cannot read.” This question contains the magic word, the cure-all that has always been able to break the back any real surveillance backlash: warrant. That’s why you will not find official British sources characterizing this new initiative as a ban on encryption; they say they still want you to have the encryption, just so long as they can break it whenever they want. This ability to be secure against everybody except the biggest and best-funded hackers in the world is a bit like the ability to turn invisible, but only while nobody’s looking.
In practice, this idea would mean that the country would legislate into existence software “backdoors” allowing the government to waltz through any commercially available means of encryption. The most obvious problem with this is that such backdoors present additional weaknesses that could be exploited by people other than the government themselves — will the government’s own servers be imperfectly encrypted in this way?"
NB: Please consider this thread about the "Ban of Encryption" and not based of UK Politics.
Quote from Forum Rules:
"We do not allow political or religion threads as the may escalate into flaming and rudeness against MalwareTips, its staff, other forum members or any other party."