Letter to the Observer
By Chris Clark, Thomas Deranek, Jesse Hamilton, and Neal Sheehan
Is encryption a fundamental right? Should citizens of the US be allowed to have a technology that completely locks out the government?
How important of an issue is encryption to you? Does it affect who you support politically? financially? socially? Should it?
In the struggle between national security and personal privacy, who will win? Are you resigned to a particular future or will you fight for it?
I can’t think of any time before the present where Americans had access to technology that completely locked out the government. Encryption may in fact be the first invention that, by its very nature, excludes any and all third party viewers. Previous attempts to keep technology or information hidden from the government have fallen short. All commercial drugs, which are essentially proprietary secrets, must go through the FDA. Volkswagen had to recently fess up to their business secrets in an automotive scandal due to EPA regulations. But encryption has yet to be breached, and that’s because creating a circumvention to encryption defeats the purpose of privacy altogether.
While it sounds very anti-government to say that encryption is a fundamental right that the government has no authority to disrupt, it’s for the best interest of the American people. In different circumstances, the nation might be united in fighting for encryption. But in today’s climate with heart-wrenching tragedies in the news, many people want to know all the answers so people can be brought to justice and so we can protect ourselves, but compromising what keeps your daily and professional activities private is not the answer.
I wouldn’t have thought that encryption was so important to me because it has become so commonplace in my life. Even in a simple Web Applications class HTTPS was a standard we had to implement to even have our application be considered relevant. It’s difficult to say whether the issue affects me in other circles of life because it’s so finely ingrained in each aspect of life. I can’t say it affects who I support politically or financially because it’s very difficult to find instances of those who don’t support encryption! Sure, if Venmo shoveled my password into Port 80 on their servers, I wouldn’t pay my friends that way because I’d be out of money in minutes, but that’s not the case. Don’t get me wrong, encryption is very important to me. Encryption is also important to a lot of other people, so there’s not a very clear dichotomy to compare.
Sadly, I think that the contest between national security and personal privacy will end with national security triumphing. While I’m all for national security, I believe the solution the FBI is currently looking for is short-sighted and foolhardy. I suppose that’s a bit of a negative outlook – I feel resigned to that particular future. But rather than sulk about it, I think we, as computer scientists, ought to prepare for the consequences of compromised encryption. It’s possible to create reliable products out of unreliable parts (that’s a large part of information assurance), and so we ought not resign and put our tails between our legs if the FBI wins out over Apple. We’ll just have to redouble our efforts and realize that, maybe for the time being, what we thought was private may not be entirely so.
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