Bob Barr has recently added his voice to the ongoing call of law enforcement to provide exceptional access to encrypted communications. Here’s why that’s not going to work.
“Exceptional access — as governments propose — is the problem of making a system selectively secure. I can tell you, it’s hard enough to make a secure system. It’s vastly harder to make a system secure except for governments, and only available to governments that consist of ‘democratically elected representatives and [a] judiciary’ as the GCHQ authors imagine.”
—Jon Callas, “The ‘Ghost User’ Ploy to Break Encryption Won’t Work.” DavisVanguard.org. July 24,2019.
Is being able to access the encrypted communications of everyone enough? Between the drone’s Gorgon Stare above, the Ring camera on every other front door for police to access, televisions tracking every show being watched, phones and digital assistants listening in on conversations, fitness trackers as evidence in court cases, Stringray and other technology for phone tracking, license plate readers to track vehicle movement over time, surveillance balloons and so on, it feels to me like the police and military are a little under-powered these days.
I was promised a camera in my television watching my every move, a Room 101 for not sufficiently toeing the line and a boot stomping on a face of humanity forever. Was Uncle Orwell lying to me?
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