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The writer is president of the coded messaging service signal
Imagine a government that tells a car company to secretly weaken the effectiveness of the brake in all the cars it sells, recklessly endangering the safety of millions. It would be an unimaginable damage to public safety.
Sadly, this is what is happening in the UK in cyber security, where Apple was forced to strip vital intimacy and protect the safety of encryption from end to end from its reserve storage service-exposing people and infrastructure to significant weakness.
Apple is not Zuzar here. That was not a choice made easily. The company has invested billions of dollars in research and cryptographic development and trades itself as a friendly company for intimacy.
But Apple was boxing in a corner after receiving a UK government order demanding that it rewrite and weaken the essential technology of intimacy, with the aim of engineering engineering not only in the United Kingdom, but globally, in order to give the government the “back door” of accessing client code.
The government also ordered the company to tell anyone, using the so -called “Snoopers card” to maintain order, and the security degradation he mandated, secret.
Instead of respecting, Apple removed the Encryption from reserve copies only in the UK and launched a legal complaint. This is a decrease in damage, but it is still harmful. If you are in the United Kingdom, your iCloud reserves – full of things like sensitive business documents, intimate photos, evidence and financial records – are now vulnerable to hacks, violations, thefts and hostile government demands that Apple may or cannot resist.
For those outside the UK, the news is still bad. Communication does not stand within the jurisdictional limits. Anything you shared with friends or peers in the UK now lacks the protection of encryption from bottom to bottom. That picture you sent a friend, or confidential information you shared with another pair is now tangible.
If this is what Apple can be subjected to, we also have to pause, and tremble, as we think about which other technology companies may have received such a secret order, and instead of fighting, to be silent. Business executives in particular need to worry about what this can say about them, and the trust they put on cloud servers, software and other critical systems that may be secretly subject to reckless endangerment.
The United Kingdom is part of a dangerous trend that threatens online security of our global infrastructures. Legislators in Sweden recently proposed a law that would force communication providers to build door weaknesses. France is ready to make the same mistake when voting to include “ghost participants” in safe conversations through the return doors. “Control” legislation follows Brussels.
Main infrastructures such as air traffic control, medical equipment and emergency operations rely on hardware and calculator software. The use of strong encryption to protect security and privacy is therefore a matter of national security.
The threat is not hypothetical. Last year, the US government discovered Typhoon Salt’s attacks on American telecommunications systems, in which China -related state hackers gained access to call data, text messages and other more intimate information of millions of Americans. Possible victims included President Donald Trump. How did the hackers do this? They used the “rear doors” integrated into telecommunications systems.
The basic issue is simple: encryption is mathematics and mathematics does not discriminate between a government investigator and a criminal hacker – a rear door is a rear door and if it is there, one can enter.
There is also a contradiction in the game. If politicians dream of making the United Kingdom a technology center, they should not work to undermine the online security foundations on which a applicable technology industry is based.
The government must withdraw its wrong mandate. Instead of strangely cut the brake cables in the technological machine, it must work to strengthen the safety and privacy of technology that forms the nervous system of our world. Business executives also need to take a role, making it clear that these dangerous movements are unacceptable, and pushing companies from which they license technology to establish encryption, and other protection, without which their interests and those of their customers will be vulnerable.
We have so much ceded by the essential operations of our lives and institutions for technology, we must admit that strong encryption is not the enemy of security – it IS security. The argument that weakening encryption will make each of us more secure is as wrong as it is dangerous.
