Amber Rudd: ‘I don’t need to understand encryption to understand it’s helping criminals’
Amber Rudd: ‘I don’t need to understand encryption to understand it’s helping criminals’
Before my response to the above I should make it clear that I’m a life long privacy advocate having worked on the board of the Internet Industry Association for 6 years. I know the privacy vs nation state security issues inside out. I won’t support back doors into cryptographically secured data.
I’m also a big fan of crypto and fully understand how it works. I’ve built symmetric and asymmetric based cryptographic messaging systems from scratch. The book Applied Cryptography was my bible for many years.
My Response:
You should have a basic understanding of a technology before you start to legislate against it. For example, we all know a gun shoots a bullet and you can’t really stop that bullet to take a look at it before it hits the target. Crypto is like that, you just can’t stop it mid flight and take a look inside. You could I suppose photograph it, and sure you can look at an encrypted message, but you can’t take a look inside the message, or the bullet. Just like the gun and the bullet, encrypted messages work a bit like that.
You could of course put armour plate in place to stop a bullet, and that’s probably your best defence against encrypted messages, block the sender and even the recipient somehow.
Why not copy the ‘take down notice’ idea and issue orders to encrypted messaging vendors to block certain individuals accounts from sending or receiving. But then of course they will just open another account, in the same way that content just pops up on another services provider as soon as it’s taken down.
It’s not an easy problem to solve, if in fact it’s solvable. Remember it’s a technology that’s been designed to prevent a message being intercepted and then read.
Cryptography for Dummies.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cryptography-Dummies-Chey-Cobb/dp/0764541889