The encryption genie is already out of the bottle

The world has declared open season on encryption and civil liberties. In one week Thailand announced its draft Cyber Security bill, Irans highest court banned encrypted messaging apps and now the United Kingdom has announced its own war on privacy in the wake of the French terror attacks.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron said that he will not allow terrorists to have a safe place to communicate. This is understood to mean that encrypted communications apps are to be banned or backdoored to allow access by the security services.

The idea of eavesdropping on communications to protect the monarchy is genuinely popular in Thailand, as is the idea of empowering the state to get rid of terrorists in the west.

The only problem is banning encryption simply cannot work. The genie is already out of the bottle.

I asked Caspar Bowden, former Chief Privacy Officer at Microsoft and now an independent privacy advocate, for his comments on Camerons pledge. Bowden pointed out that the exact same arguments and counter-arguments had been made in the wake of 9-11.

In October 2001, Bowden wrote a piece for the BBC website that still is valid today as it was over 13 years ago.

Bowden said that the politicians argument that there must be a balance between civil liberties and public safety is a false dichotomy.

Those who want a nostalgic return to the era of phone-tapping are either nave or impervious to reason. The only way to stop terrorist cells communicating via the internet is to disinvent it. Encryption is irrelevant, he said.

There are four ways in which encryption can be compromised in a way that would allow the state to access messages with warrant, but all are fundamentally flawed, as Bowden argued back in 2001.

The 'back-door'

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The encryption genie is already out of the bottle