Clueless Governments Are Trying The “Privacy For Us, But Not For You” – Again

There’s a new War on Encryption going. It won’t work. But it can cause a lot of headache and collateral damage, not to mention lost productivity hours trying to explain basic technical facts to politicans who are paid to not understand them.

In the early 1990s, the first War on Encryption heated up, and it was mainly over Phil Zimmermann’s PGP – a utility that, for the first time, allowed ordinary people to encrypt their communications outside of reach of government. As a result, governments immediately banned the whole thing. The United States classified it as military-grade weaponry (yes, really), making it subject to very tight restrictions, and France didn’t care to justify why, but just banned it outright.

It took a while of tinkering with source code, and pointing out “if I can write these lines freely, then I can math. If I can math, then I can code. And if I can code, then I can encrypt.” It took prolonged court battles (that literally involved encryption source code printed onto T-shirts as a political statement) before courts established that Freedom of Speech encompasses the Freedom to Code – and those are landmark rulings for civil liberties.

Today, we use encryption for everything. Including keeping the government out of our lives. When we don’t do it consciously (like using a VPN), others instruct our computer to do it for us (like banks, Google, and Facebook switching to an encrypted connection, even if you don’t ask for it). Governments are annoyed by this. Again. Governments are demanding “back doors” in encryption. Again. David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, has gone on a rampage demanding privacy for the UK government, but not for anyone else: demanding back doors to all encryption software used within UK borders, backdoors that only the UK government can use.

This is not just utter technical moronity of the highest level. It is a completely backwards view on the very job they are doing.

Public servants work for the public. You can kind of hear that in the title, “public” and “servant”. This includes people all the way through all levels of government, including the Head of State.

Odds are that you’re not allowed to hold secrets from your boss as to how you’re doing your job, or in fact, anything that concerns your job. There is no reasons people who work for the public – and whose salary is paid by the public – should be treated differently. Simultaneously, these public servants have a duty to uphold the right to privacy for everybody else. But through a number of power grabs, a couple of very misinformed and misguided people in such positions – David Cameron included – have subverted this to mean the very opposite.

But it isn’t.

Ordinary citizens do have a right to privacy. That’s in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, it’s in the US Bill of Rights, it’s in the European Convention on Human Rights, and elsewhere. Public servants have accountability to those who pay their wages for everything job-related. That goes with the concept of a job.

It looks like we’ll have to battle all of this out again, and governments will talk about the usual Horsemen of the Apocalypse – drug lords, child abuse, organized crime, and ordinary file sharing – to try to justify eliminating the very fundamental liberty of privacy. (In doing so, they are subverting another principle, by the way, that of presumption of innocence: you cannot justify a blanket intrusion into everybody’s privacy by saying that there may be a criminal there somewhere, you actually need individual and formal suspicion.)

There’s nothing saying it will end any other way than it did last time: with thousands of productivity hours wasted on trying to explain the most basic things to politicians who are paid to not understand, and with courts who rule that you indeed are allowed to write code, while politicians are chanting about organized crime outside the courtroom and to TV cameras afterward.

In the meantime, privacy remains your own responsibility.