No Country For Any Business: Imagining Britain Without Encryption

Its January 2018, just less than threeyears after David Cameron secured a second-term as Prime Minister largely thanks to a Labour Party bereft of a true leader, variousgaffescommitted by the far right UK Independence Party, and an almost non-existent showing from the Liberal Democrats. But the polls have turned against Cameron. Though the recent return of Tony Blair as Labour leader has brought his party back from the brink, its theeconomy tilting back into recession and a general sense of social unease that are causing many to call for Camerons resignation.

The economic strife has partly been brought about by a general decline in business activity. Many foreign firms have fled the country due to the speedy introduction and enactment of the Anti-Terror Communications Act 2016, which was spawned shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris and implicitly outlawed the use of encryption in modern communications technologies. As many businesses use such comms systems, this has perverselyopened up more corporatedata to criminals and intelligence agents from countries seeking to establish digital espionage operations inside organisations across industries. Technology providers, including Apple Apple, Google Google, Facebook and Microsoft, have been asked to either make the algorithms that generate encryption keys more predictable and therefore weaken their offerings with backdoor access, or grant governments access to those keys. Some have decidedto close their respectiveUK shops in protest. Others are simply being as uncooperative as they can.

Even native companies are looking for new homes. The worst impact has come from the rapidly diminishing finance industry of the capital, where banks, who rely on off-the-shelf encryption technologies as much as terrorists do, have decided to move operations to less repressive environments.The once-burgeoning technology industry has been eviscerated, as the UK is deemed a backwards country afraid of secure systems, meaning more significant job cuts across London, Manchester, Cambridge and other tech hubs. Property is one of only a few industries left unharmed by the Act, thanks to the continuing foreign investment in flats and homes that remain uninhabited.

The government has refused to say whether any terrorist plots have yet been foiled thanks to the introduction of the law, such has been the blanket reticence of the Cameron regime in recent months. Freedom of Information requests have revealed the strengthened Regulatory and Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) has been used more than 12,000 times in the last year by the Metropolitan Police alone, but in a third of cases those on the receiving end were journalists and human rights activists. Again, theres no information on the number of extremist plots uncoveredby police or agents using the laws. Its believed the few terrorists who are planning attacks continue to use open source encryption toolsstill available to those with the wherewithal to employ them. For what has citizens privacy has been obliterated?

Meanwhile, cyber crime has spiralled out of control, as hackers have repeatedly uncovered the governmentbackdoors installed in servers across UK data centres. Data loss has grown 100 per cent in just a year. Almost every server is now considered compromised by malicious hackers and government spies

Prime Minister David Cameron

All this, in early 2015, does not seem like an impossible future, though the return of Blair to the political classes might be a prophecytoo far. But this isthe nightmare Cameron appears willing to coax into existence with his bizarre, technologically-illiterate insistence the government should be able to circumvent all protections on general communications so that every message sent inside the country can be read by the state. Outside of the obvious detrimental effects on freedom of speech and privacy, and the questionable impact itwould have on real-world terrorism, its apparent the British economy would also suffer greatly.

Take the word of a company that provides web encryption and security services for a number of UK government websites, CloudFlare. Its CEO Matthew Prince told Forbes finance firms would have good reason to relocate if Cameron got his quasi-Orwellian state. If youre a large financial institution working out of the City and all of a sudden youre not able to use strong crypto, then thats a reason to locate less of your infrastructure in the City, Prince said.

Tech firms, especially those in the US, will either push back or pull out of the UKaltogether. Britain has no effective sovereignty. Most online services are run by US startups who frankly dont give a toss about Cameron thinks. Instagram, for example, had only 11 employees when Facebook bought them; they already had hundreds of millions of users. Firms like that dont answer the phone, not even to users, and certainly not to foreign policemen, said professor Ross Anderson, from the cryptography team at the University of Cambridge.

Fundamentally, Google, Apple or CloudFlare are about securing users trust if were ordered to do something which is inherently about weakening the technical protection of that trust, that is anathema to what were trying to do, Prince added. Its safe to say tech companies would push back fairly strongly. Whilst there wouldnt be a mass exodus, there would likely be a diaspora who relocated to countries where they have better guarantees around their civil liberties and the security of their operations.

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No Country For Any Business: Imagining Britain Without Encryption