Stop Demonising Encryption and Privacy

Guest Post by Michele Neylon. This article first appeared on the Blacknight Solutions blog

Governments. The Internet. Freedom. Privacy. Security. When you put all of those terms together it’s usually because they’ve had yet another head-on collision. In the UK David Cameron and his colleagues seem to be hellbent on breaking the internet by banning encryption. In order for online business to prosper the internet needs to be as secure and safe as possible. Encryption technologies help make that happen. Banning encryption would be like pushing the internet back to the stone age. It’s incredibly dumb. It also won’t actually do anything to stop any real threats of terrorism. Government needs to stop treating us all as if we were guilty until proven innocent.

Is the internet 100% safe and secure?

No, of course, it isn’t.

Can you conduct business safely and securely online?

Yes, of course, you can, thanks to encryption and other things. Let’s take a small step back…

In the physical world where we eat, sleep and go about our daily business there are risks and threats. There are criminals. There are bad things. Most of us put locks on our front doors. We have curtains on our windows and we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in both our business dealings and our daily lives. No government would ever consider outlawing locks and I am yet to hear of any big pushback against the use of curtains on windows. If you go into a “dodgy” part of any reasonable sized town or city you might have issues… but I don’t feel nervous every time I step outside onto the street.

So why on earth is the internet being treated differently?

This madness has simply got to stop. Government doesn’t understand the internet and doesn’t control it. Maybe that’s a scary concept for some politicians, but breaking the internet is definitely not the solution. If government has concerns about internet security, and we know that they do, then they need to work with industry on this, not against us. Using “terrorism” as an excuse to break internet security is crazy. And the 99%+ of internet users who aren’t breaking any laws are the ones who would suffer.