David Cameron just asked:
in our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?
By “we”, he means the security professionals around the world. In effect, he would be demanding keys to banking transactions, online shopping carts, email, WhatsApp, iMessage, movie DRM, WiFi passwords and every other secured transaction on the market. It’s already illegal to refuse to give your password to the security forces but the response from the vendors of these products would not necessarily to be to hand over the keys; it’s more likely to cause them to withdraw their products and services from the islands. Just to use one example, iMessage would simply not be able to operate on these shores and it would therefore be illegal to use it. It would be illegal to use your own VPN, without having some sort of governmental back door in there.
We’ve seen how effective banning guns has been. Yes, we have very few guns deaths but criminals still have them and I think Camerons special advisors are underestimating the ease of criminals in creating their own bespoke networks on the Internet and via wireless.
The fact that criminals are on the public Internet is a boon to law enforcement. It actually gives the government a chance to intercept. The alternatives are worse: criminal networks will run their own messaging networks on the Internet with non-backdoored communication channels or they’ll create their own closed darknets.
The problem with being to see every conversation is that they’ll look at every conversation. Surveillance will become an inexhaustible drain on technology resource; an ever-rising cost as they trawl through data a mile wide but only an inch deep.
While they’re inspecting your To-Do lists for secret words and deciphering your pattern of movements and check-ins on Swarm, they’re going to miss the deliberate attempts.
It’s not whether we want to be able to ready everything, David. It’s whether it’s appropriate, whether it’s necessary and whether it would be effective. It would cripple our digital industries and for all of these reasons, it’s important to see it for what it is. An undeliverable. It’s designed to create fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of voters.