Skip to main content

No more secrets

The UK government has recently introduced legislation that any citizen is required to provide decryption keys for any privately encrypted data, or face a 2 year jail term.

The excuse is that they need to "fight terrorism". This all sounds very Orwellian, where in George Orwell's book "1984", even a thought is a crime, and an invisible enemy is concocted in order to make the population more submissive. Sound familiar?

Encryption is a technology that is out of the bag. The authorities are technically powerless to break strong encryption schemes, although they do have some very large computers to try to crack encryption keys. The numbers are always on the side of the individual however - no matter how large a computer the police have, you can use a key that is too large for them.

The fundamental question is whether I should even be allowed to have secrets that aren't in my head? Is possession of information in itself a crime? Again, George Orwell's thoughtcrime. I personally think that all information should be free, though I can see the drawbacks of that. So what if someone has a deviant sexual fetish? - an image does no harm, and better to use images than to actually force yourself upon a child. As it happens, I would be quite interested in reading about cracking encryption schemes or bomb making - but purely out of intellectual curiosity! That should not be a crime. Expressing an "illegal opinion" (e.g. this religion is a load of nonsense, or yes, China really did invade Tibet) should never be a crime. There is a world of difference between learning, thinking and doing. Thought, and therefore information, should never be a crime.

Encryption is liberating, but unfortunately it is often used for shady purposes. There are many legitimate reasons for privacy, such as company secrets, medical, legal or financial information, data theft or identity theft, so the argument "you must have something to hide" doesn't hold water.

There are a number of other ways to get around this law. You could store your data off-shore, where the police have no powers over it. You could also plausibly claim that the data is "random bits", and the police couldn't prove it is data at all. You could claim to have forgotten your password (which in my case is quite likely.)

Ultimately this law is just an excuse to detain suspects without charge (any real charge, that is), whilst gathering evidence. The reason is because foreign terrorists are likely to flee the country.

I can see that fighting terrorism is important, but not at any cost. The problem is that I don't want to live in a police state where the police have excessive powers. Yes, you could invent lots of laws that would make the police's job a lot easier, including torture, detention without trial, drugging you, random strip searches, restrictions on movement etcetera.

I have nothing to hide, but I shouldn't need to prove that, and I have the right to remain silent. If I was required to hand over decryption keys for some data, I might seriously consider civil disobediance in order to highlight the flaw in this type of law. We are supposedly a free society, but that died a long time ago. Thanks Bush, thanks Blair.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can information theory prove the existence of God?

I recently came across this website by Perry Marshall, which makes a really interesting proof of the existence of God. The argument is basically that DNA constitutes information (a code), yet all information that we know of is the product of a mind. Randomness cannot create information. Therefore, God exists. Lovely argument. Now let's pick some holes. 1) My first observation is that this argument is almost exactly the same as entropy. The argument is that DNA is a low entropy state. Yet randomness always increases entropy. Therefore DNA cannot be the product of random processes, therefore it must be the work of God (or Maxwell's Demon). However this argument is invalid because localised decreases in entropy are perfectly possible, and expected, even though the entropy of the system as a whole increases. Considering that the site claims to make use of information theory, it presumably is aware of information entropy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_entropy It fo...
3 comments
Read more

Breaking the Article 50 Impasse

Andrew Tyrie overestimates the UK's control over when the UK government can invoke Article 50. As with much of the Brexit debate, hope and aspiration trump cold hard reality. The next few months will see a lot of work by the UK government setting up new departments and policy positions relating to the triggering of Article 50 and Britain's exit from the EU. This is a sensible and necessary delay. However this article by The Independent makes the case that the UK should delay invoking Article 50 until we establish an informal agreement with the EU on our exit terms. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-theresa-may-andrew-tyrie-must-manage-unrealistic-expectations-warns-tory-mp-a7220681.html This is very desirable from the UK's perspective, but flatly contradicts statements by the EU (including direct statements by Jean-Claude Juncker, Donald Tusk and Cecilia Malmström, as well as official EU policy) that no talks can happen prior to invoking Article 50...
3 comments
Read more

Simulation independence

I recently came across Nick Boström's article about the simulation argument , which goes that there is a non-zero chance that we are actually simulated individuals, and not actually made of carbon at all. It was spun out of The Matrix series of movies, though is a recurring theme right from Descartes and the Brain in a Vat. Key to this idea is the argument of substrate independence , that is, carbon-based cells are not the only possible way of conjuring consciousness. Surely it isn't the carbon-based molecules per se that cause consciousness, but rather their configuration, and the kinds of computation (if that's the right word) being performed. Surely any "computer program" that reproduces the workings of the brain sufficiently well would suffice, since its operation and outputs would be essentially identical to the biological brain. The simulation argument goes that we are not all that far from achieving that level of computation, so therefore there may wel...
3 comments
Read more