If You Have A Moral Right To Own A Safe, You Also Have A Moral Right To Encrypt

Politicians and law enforcement are still on scare campaigns against encryption. Such campaigns are morally corrupt. You have as much moral right to defend your data, as you have to defend your territory. You are in the moral right when you buy a safe, and you are in the moral right when you encrypt your data and correspondence.

Let’s take a look at where encryption of phones and phonecalls fall on the list of our seven privacies: the privacies of body, correspondence, data, finance, identity, location, and territory.

These are equally important and map well to one another. Since data and correspondence are fuzzy concepts, let’s instead look at the privacy of territory. Do you have the right to a closed space, where other people may not intrude? More specifically, do you have the right to lock a piece of territory, so that nobody else can open it?

Do you have a moral right to own a safe?

If you have a moral right to own a safe, and therefore a moral right to privacy of territory (even in the face of lawful adversaries), then you also have a moral right to encryption, which brings privacy of data and correspondence.

It used to be that encryption was only used by a) tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists and b) technically savvy people when they had a sensitive subject to discuss. Therefore, this has been allowed to slip into suspicion in itself. There’s nothing suspicious about encrypting, and above all, there’s nothing immoral about it.

It’s about territory. Digital territory. Everybody has a right to defend their terrority, and nobody has an obligation to help anybody else – specifically including law enforcement officers – in invading such territory. (If you own a safe, it’s up to police to open it if they want it open; you are under no obligation whatsoever to assist with the invasion of your own territory.)

Of course you have a moral right to own a safe, and this translates directly to privacies of data and correspondence. Encryption is not just proper. It’s the morally correct thing to do and to defend.

“But if encryption is legal”, the clueless politicians object, “criminals will be able to use it!”

That’s true.

That’s also true for ordinary safes. That doesn’t change the fact that we consider it an inalienable right to lock our stuff up in such safes, so nobody but us will be able to access it.

In fact, that idea specifically includes law enforcement: an adversary is an adversary, regardless of whether they are acting legally or not. Now, law enforcement won’t probably be able to break a safe with casual effort and limited budget, but given enough time and resources, they will probably be able to break any safe. In other words, safes are exactly like encryption.

This is also an important safeguard: if law enforcement can’t break a safe (or encryption) without significant spending and effort, that also means such invasions of privacy won’t – can’t – be used without careful prior consideration in each individual case. We’ve lost that consideration. We ought to do things to bring it back. Like encrypt.

Privacy remains your own responsibility. Encrypt your data and correspondence.