Everyone is a proponent of strong encryption.
There are two types of encryption: one that will prevent your sister from reading your diary and one that will prevent your government.
The concern is over what will happen as strong encryption becomes commonplace with all digital communications and stored data. Right now the use of encryption isn't all that widespread, but that state of affairs is expected to change rapidly.
Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.
Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.
If you go to a coffee shop or at the airport, and you're using open wireless, I would use a VPN service that you could subscribe for 10 bucks a month. Everything is encrypted in an encryption tunnel, so a hacker cannot tamper with your connection.
A company can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on firewalls, intrusion detection systems and encryption and other security technologies, but if an attacker can call one trusted person within the company, and that person complies, and if the attacker gets in, then all that money spent on technology is essentially wasted.
Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.
Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people.
We need to think about encryption not as this sort of arcane, black art. It's a basic protection.
Let's put it this way. The United States government has assembled a massive investigation team into me personally, into my work with the journalists, and they still have no idea what documents were provided to the journalist, what they have, what they don't have, because encryption works.
I'm a strong believer in strong encryption.
As far as Paris goes, we don't know for sure yet how these guys communicate among themselves and how they communicated back to the ISIS leadership in Iraq and Syria, but I'm fairly confident we're going to learn they used these encrypted communication applications that have commercial encryption and are extremely difficult for companies to break - and which the companies have made the decision not to produce a key for.
It may be true that encryption makes certain investigations of crime more difficult. It can close down certain investigative techniques or make it harder to get access to certain kinds of electronic evidence. But it also prevents crime by making our computers, our infrastructure, our medical records, our financial records, more robust against criminals. It prevents crime.
I believe that if you took privacy and you said, I'm willing to give up all of my privacy to be secure. So you weighted it as a zero. My own view is that encryption is a much better, much better world. And I'm not the only person that thinks that.
The digital age is for me in many ways about temporal wounding. It's really messed up our ontological clocks. In the digital economy, everything is archived, catalogued, readily available, and yet nothing really endures. The links are digital encryptions that can and won't be located. That will have to be reassembled over time. It won't be exactly what it was. There will be some slightly altered version. So the book is both an immaterial and material artifact.
I think it's interesting because the 1990s ended with the government pretty much giving up. There was a recognition that encryption was important. In 2000, the government considerably loosened the export controls on encryption technology and really went about actively encouraging the use of encryption rather than discouraging it.
When the September 11th attacks happened, only about a year later, the crypto community was holding its breath because here was a time when we just had an absolutely horrific terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and if the NSA and the FBI were unhappy with anything, Congress was ready to pass any law they wanted. The PATRIOT Act got pushed through very, very quickly with bipartisan support and very, very little debate, yet it didn't include anything about encryption.
Sure, end-to-end encryption means that whether it's a phone call we're on or an email message we're sending or any form of electronic communication, that the content of that communication is encrypted from your device, such as your phone or PC, unto the other person's device at the other side, wherever they might be on the planet Earth.
So, in 1993, in what was probably the first salvo of the first Crypto War, there was concern coming from the National Security Agency and the FBI that encryption would soon be incorporated into lots of communications devices, and that that would cause wiretaps to go dark. There was not that much commercial use of encryption at that point. Encryption, particularly for communications traffic, was mostly something done by the government.
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