My children are still young so I still have quite some say in how certain things are done. Sometimes I have to make a tough decision and I really don’t want to look like the bad guy. When this does happen I have a couple options to prevent this from happening.
- have mama make the decision
- a quick bait and switch
- agree but under impossible conditions
The last one works well, right now but as the children get older their reasoning and logic skills are starting to catch onto this – sure you can go swimming as long as you don’t get wet.
I sometimes think that governments or rather politicians think that they are still dealing with children with limited cognitive skills. Either that or they don’t have the imagination to see how someone might circumvent their plan. Granted, I usually think this when they talk about adding “back doors” into hardware or software.
I guess it is just too hard for the law makers to realize that indeed the government will be using those back doors for pretty much the purpose they were created, but it just won’t be our government. Well, them and a few really tech savvy criminals.
The same seems to be true for encryption. It is fine as long as some official agency or police group can look at the contents of the communications when they want to. It is really best if they can somehow “read” the communications without anyone knowing it, but it is ok if in a pinch they have a quick chat with the company hosting the service to get the information.
However, they have a tendency to get really worried when this is no longer possible. It is correct proper encryption may make their job a lot harder. They will have to catch the bad guys red handed or it will be hard to produce enough of the circumstantial evidence that paints the picture of their intension.
But these types of intrusive changes are usually not very popular and nobody likes to be criticized. To ensure that is not possible to criticize the change it simply needs to be linked with something that is impossible to defend – like terrorism. Nobody would like to advance an argument that appears to be supporting terrorists.
Anyway, it sounds like technology companies may not be able to provide solutions so secure that they even they cannot look at the users data if this new Investigatory Powers Bill is passed. I guess that Apple won’t be able to sell their iphone with end to end encryption, or it won’t really be end to end.
After all, they don’t need to build in a back door, as long as it is possible to ensure that the communication or data can be looked at when ever they really want to.
