Technological enablers aren’t good or evil, they simply exist to facilitate whatever purpose they were designed for. Of course we always aim to maximise the good they’re capable of whilst diminishing the bad, however changing their fundamental characteristics (which are often the sole purpose for their existence) in order to do so is, in my mind, abhorrent. This is why I think things like Internet filters and other solutions which hope to combat the bad parts of the Internet are a fool’s errand as they would seek to destroy the very thing they set out to improve. The latest instalment of which comes to us courtesy of David Cameron who is now seeking to have a sanctioned backdoor to all encrypted communications and to legislate against those who’d resist.
Like most election waffle Cameron is strong on rhetoric but weak on substance but you can get the gist of it from this quote:
“I think we cannot allow modern forms of communication to be exempt from the ability, in extremis, with a warrant signed by the home secretary, to be exempt from being listened to.”
Essentially what he’s referring to is the fact that encrypted communications, the ones that are now routinely employed by consumer level applications like WhatsApp and iMessage, shouldn’t be allowed to exist without a method for intelligence agencies to tap into them. It’s not like these communications are exempt from being listened to currently just that it’s infeasible for the security agencies to decrypt them once they’ve got their hands on them. The problem that arises here though is that unlike other means of communication introducing a mechanism like this, a backdoor by which encrypted communications can be decrypted, this fundamentally breaks the utility of the service and introduces a whole slew of potential threats that will be exploited.
The crux of the matter stems from the trust relationships that are required for two way encrypted communications to work. For the most part you’re relying on the channel between both parties to be free from interference and monitoring from interfering parties. This is what allows corporations and governments to spread their networks over the vast reaches of the Internet as they can ensure that information passing through untrusted networks isn’t subject to prying eyes. Taking this proposal into mind any encrypted communications which pass through the UK’s networks could be intercepted, something which I’m sure a lot of corporations wouldn’t like to sign on for. This is not to mention the millions of regular people who rely on encrypted communications for their daily lives, like anyone who’s used Facebook or a secure banking site.
Indeed I believe the risks poses by introducing a backdoor into encrypted communications far outweighs any potential benefits that you’d care to mention. You see any backdoor into a system, no matter how well designed it is, will severely weaken the encrypted channel’s ability to resist intrusion from a malicious attacker. No matter which way you slice it you’re introducing another attack vector into the equation when there was, at most, 2 before you now have at least 3 (the 2 endpoints plus the backdoor). I don’t know about you but I’d rather not increase my risk of being compromised by 50% just because someone might’ve said plutonium on my private chats.
The idea speaks volumes to David Cameron’s lack of understanding of technology as whilst you might be able to get some commercial companies to comply with this you will have no way of stopping peer to peer encrypted communications using open source solutions. Simply put if the government, somehow, managed to get PGP to work a backdoor in it’d be a matter of days before it was no longer used and another solution worked into its place. Sure, you could attempt to prosecute all those people using illegal encryption, but they said the same thing about BitTorrent and I haven’t seen mass arrests yet.
It’s becoming painfully clear that the conservative governments of the world are simply lacking in fundamental understanding of how technology works and thus concoct solutions which simply won’t work in reality. There are far easier ways for them to get the data that they so desperately need (although I’m yet to see the merits of any of these mass surveillance networks) however they seem hell bent on getting it in the most retarded way possible. I would love to say that my generation would be different when they get into power but stupid seems to be an inheritable condition when it comes to conservative politics.
