Why Western Governments Want to Destroy Computer Security
-- and Your Security Along the Way
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001084.html
It's always illuminating when the longtime enemies of security and
free speech come out from the shadows, making their intentions and
sensibilities crystal clear for all to see and understand.
Nope, I'm not talking about terrorists of whatever stripes -- we've
always known how criminal scum like that thinks and how they desire to
remake the world in the image of their tiny minds and 13th century
mindsets.
Nor am I speaking of Putin, Kim Jong-un, Ali Khamenei, Xi Jinping, or
the like -- the iron fist with which these leaders desire to control
speech and suppress domestic dissent is all too obvious even at a
glance.
No. I'm painfully forced to note the new threat matrix aimed squarely
at shedding our free speech and security rights that is spewing
squarely from Western governments -- from the U.S., U.K, and across
the length and breadth of Europe.
It's tempting to suggest that this renewed push to strip us of these
fundamental rights was triggered by the recent devastating terrorist
attack in Paris -- but that horrendous event serves only as an excuse
for a long simmering, long sought crackdown on Internet speech and
security that has been smoldering for ages.
Going all the way back to 1993 and the fiasco of the proposed U.S.
"Clipper Chip" reveals the U.S. intelligence community's fear of
strong cryptography. And today, the EU's enthusiastic embrace of the
nightmarish "Right to Be Forgotten" concept, and their push to apply
that EU censorship system across the entire world, gives us clues to
European motives along these lines.
So for anyone really paying close attention to these matters, the dots
were already pretty much in place, certainly sufficiently so that the
latest proposals from Western leaders shouldn't come as any kind of
significant surprise.
And those repulsive proposals have been arriving hot and heavy over
the last few days.
President Obama is reportedly to offer a vast expansion of criminal
penalties for "computer hacking" broadly defined, and as part of that
legislative package also to vastly expand the definition of hacking in
the process.
If you thought the late Aaron Swartz really had the book thrown at him
by DOJ, the new proposals would likely make that look like a paperback
novel compared with a wall of ancient encyclopedias dumped on the
heads of future defendants.
The details we've heard so far reportedly suggest that at the
discretion of prosecutors, merely clicking the wrong link on a public
site, or conducting perfectly legitimate cybersecurity research, could
net you being shackled in a federal cell for a decade or more.
But it gets worse.
Western leaders, led by David Cameron of the UK, appear poised to
demand that all Internet communications be subject to data retention
and monitoring by governments, and that no applications be permitted
to deploy encryption that the government could not disable or defeat
on demand. Prime Minister Cameron has said this explicitly of late,
and is seeking support from other European leaders and President Obama
for this disastrous concept.
Let's be crystal clear about this. While the initial discussion might
revolve around instant messaging apps, it's obvious that the logical
and inevitable extension of this concept is to require the undermining
of all Internet encryption. Email. PGP. The works.
And what you can't backdoor or otherwise undermine you simply outlaw,
with criminal penalties draconian enough to scare off all but the most
dedicated or masochistic of free speech and security activists.
The word "security" is critical here, because while these leaders are
claiming that such proposals would enhance security to "protect us
from the terrorists" -- in reality the proposed decimation of the
foundational structures of cryptographic systems would put all of
us -- our personal information, our power systems, our industrial
facilities, and so many other aspects of our lives -- at the mercy of
cyberattacks newly enabled by such weakened and so inevitability
exploitable encryption ecosystems.
Without any exaggeration, this may easily be the most serious threat
to Internet security -- and so to the entire global community that now
depends on the Internet for so many facets of our lives -- since the
first ARPANET messages clattered over a teletype at UCLA decades ago.
Legitimate and measured means to fight against the scourge of
terrorism are essential. But those do not include trying to convert
the secure communications of law abiding citizens -- billions of
them -- into "tap on demand" portals for government snoops, no matter how
ostensibly laudable or graphically terrifying those officials attempt
to frame their arguments.
We've all come to expect the "government owns your communications"
propaganda from Putin and his ilk.
To hear the same sort of twisted reasoning -- no matter how candy
coated or sprinkled with excuses -- flinging forth from our Western
leaders is disheartening in the extreme, and must not be accepted
without vigorous challenge, debate, and due consideration for the
enormous damage such proposals could easily wreak on us all.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
I am a consultant to Google -- I speak only for myself, not for them.
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein
Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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