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The Governments plan to go to war on encryption is not the answer to terrorist threats, says our management consultancy columnist Mick James, but it will have serious repercussions for business.

Oh dear. Though I have the greatest respect for our current Prime Minister, I have to say my heart sank when I heard his latest pronouncement on what I suppose we must think of as the cyberfrontier in the war against terrorism.

Id always thought of the current Coalition as a relatively business-friendly operation, and how refreshing that our Prime Minister has demonstrated that he is aware of the more modern forms of communication made possible through the internet (currently celebrating its 25th birthday).

Camerons thesis is this: we can in extremis open peoples letters and listen to their phone calls, but theres a problem with email: it might be encrypted.

In our country do we want to allow a means of communication between people which even in extremis with a warrant personally signed by the Home Secretary that we cannot read? My answer is no we must notthe first duty of a government is to keep our people safe.

I can remember when safe would have included safe from the sort of people who might read your letters but no matter. Nor should we overlook the logical absurdity that letters and phone calls can themselves be encoded: have you got those eggs I asked you for? Yes and theyre just about to go off.

For surely the answer to the question do we want a means of communication between peoplewhich we cannot read is a fairly emphatic yes. We already have some startlingly draconian laws which make it an imprisonable offence not to disclose encryption keys or passwords (worth thinking about if you have old files or archives dating from some previous password regime you have long forgotten about).

Now one would presumably be barred from using messaging services which encrypt communications for you and keep them secure even from the carrier. Or they would have to somehow break their own security and let the government have a peek.

Have the Government really thought this through? Its not the first time theyve gone to war on encryption rather than take on the men in balaclavas with guns. Does anyone remember Pretty Good Privacy, an encryption programme so good that the US government classified it as munitions and made its export an offence, like exporting weapons grade plutonium. We entered a situation where higher mathematics, on which so many encryption programmes depend, was in danger of becoming a state secret. Then they came up with the idea of the Clipper chip. This would encode things for you but also give the government a secret backdoor code which they would of course keep securely and never put on a USB stick with loads of other codes and leave on a bus.

We stand on the brink of a digital revolution: as exciting as the internet has been for the last 25 years, my feeling is increasingly that we have only scratched the surface. Ive already written about how in many ways the only limits these days are our imaginations, but there are countervailing forces and the need for online security is one of them. Transacting online is becoming more and more of a chore and one of the few forms of exercise I get these days is running round the house trying to find codes and registration numbers or hunting for the one-time activation code before it expires.

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