Why the government shouldn’t mess with encryption

There’s a huge debate underway over governments’ demand for companies to provide “backdoors” to communications and devices protected by encryption. This capability would grant law enforcement agencies their own “master keys” capable of cracking private encrypted communications. In other words, it would ultimately help them to better spy on people.

            Whoa. That capability ignites a lot of messy complications. People in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China—where there are currently proposals to enforce provision of these backdoors—are pushing back hard. Two hundred experts, companies, and organizations from more than 40 countries signed a petition asking governments around the world to support strong encryption BUT to reject proposals for encryption backdoors that they believe would weaken digital security.

Read more on my Forbes post.