This article was taken from the May 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
As the debates about government surveillance and privacy continue, some influential politicians (including the prime minister) have started to pick on encryption.
Encrypted communications and files have long been an important element of digital security, but strong crypto is coming under fire from those who claim it is a threat to our safety, and that the security services must have mandated back doors to our encrypted devices and communications.
The political argument is framed as one of safety couched in fear. Bad people want to hurt us, and our security services claim a need to peer into the most intimate corners of our lives. Encryption matters because it protects our intellectual privacy -- our ability to be protected from surveillance or interference when we are making sense of the world by thinking, reading and speaking privately with those we trust. More and more, the acts of reading, thinking, and private communication are mediated by electronic technologies like computers, tablets, ebooks and smartphones. Whenever we shop, read, speak, and think, we now do so using devices that create records of these activities.
When we are watched, tracked and monitored, we act differently. There's an increasing body of evidence that internet surveillance stops us from reading unpopular or controversial ideas. Remember that our most cherished ideas -- that people should control the government, that heretics should not be burned at the stake and that all people are equal -- were once unpopular and controversial ideas. A free society should not fear dangerous ideas, and does not need complete intellectual surveillance. Existing forms of surveillance and policing are enough.
Encryption and intellectual privacy will of course make it more difficult for the security services to do their jobs, but so too do our other civil liberties of free speech, democratic control of the police and military, and requiring a warrant before the government enters our homes or reads our mail.
We are more secure when we have hope than when we are filled with fear and treated like potentially naughty children. Encryption promotes this kind of political security. It promotes other kinds of security as well; after all, a back door for the government can also be a back door for criminal hackers.
Fundamentally, intellectual privacy stops our lives from becoming completely transparent, leaving room for diversity, eccentricity and being able to think for ourselves. The technologies of strong encryption are a powerful practical protection for these most vital of civil liberties. Contrary to the politicians, a world without crypto would definitely be less secure. It would also be less free and much less interesting.
Neil Richards is the author of Intellectual Privacy (OUP)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
