David Cameron’s position and plans for regulating encryption are misguided and betray a fundamentally computer illiterate approach. He is ignorant of the history of computing and encryption, and his plans will damage Britain.

The Background and Facts

David Cameron, like all politicians, knows next to nothing about computers and software. In his busy world, computers are the tools of secretaries and assistants, and not something he has a particular interest in.

Men in the Security Services on the other hand do understand computers, and are asking for software to be crippled so that no communication can be transmitted in private. They know the complete history of encryption, and how previous attempts to have it outlawed or weakened have failed. They are highjacking the mass hysteria over terrorism to make a fresh attempt to take encryption away from the public.

The Electronic Communications Act 2000 in the UK was an early attempt to make it illegal to sell a software product that did not have a back door for government access. It was defeated and removed from the statutes.

In the USA, several attempts have been made to mandate government access to all private communications; some via new hardware devices like the Clipper Chip, and others through setting legal precedent. They also tried to chill the release of encryption tools by the three year harassment of Phillip Zimmerman, the author of “Pretty Good Privacy”, the tool that Edward Snowden has admitted that the NSA and GCHQ cannot break.

Even today, any encryption system with key lengths longer than 64bits must be approved by the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security before they can be exported. This is patently absurd, since key lengths of 4095bits are available to everyone globally without restriction, and all SSL is 128bits by default at a minimum world-wide.

The Current Situation

Today, Apple and Google with their iOS and Android operating systems have rolled out full device encryption so that no one can read the contents of a user’s phone. This was done in direct response to the NSA’s mass intrusion into the communications and devices of millions of innocent people.

Now David Cameron, under pressure from men who are exploiting his computer illiteracy, are trying once again to revive their decades old attempts to cripple the public’s access to encryption and privacy. They failed in the late 1990s and they will fail again, because the iPhone saturated, “selfie” taking world is a very different place today.

Everyone uses encryption, whether they know it or not, on a daily basis. All ecommerce depends on it. If David Cameron makes it law that all encryption must have a back door, then criminals will have default access to all websites that sell anything, together with easy access to the personal information of billions of net users on all devices. His demands are unworkable and ineffective because different jurisdictions will not follow him, and any software developer in the world can use both the old and new absolutely reliable tools to have secure chat and email and file storage, or simply move their services to a free jurisdiction, avoiding the anti-tech British laws.

Cameron can demand that encryption has back doors in Britain, but he cannot demand that Americans or anyone else follow him. This would mean that only British web sites and services are vulnerable; the entire British internet would be globally recognized as an unsafe zone for e-commerce. It would be a disaster for the tech sector of the UK that the government is so keen to promote.

Mixed Messages

The messages coming out of the government are not coherent, and its clear that David Cameron is nothing more than the unhappy messenger. On the one hand, his ministers want “Silicon Roundabout” to be the centre of the tech explosion in Europe, but on the other hand, they are being told to cripple the key tool used in making that tech work. Clearly, this is the sound of two voices at odds with each other.