UPDATED 11:00 EDT / JULY 15 2015

NEWS

Cameron’s ban on whispering

Private communication systems have been around since the invention of human culture. Many are still in use today and are used almost universally. My wife uses them to great effect. A discrete whisper in my ear while we are at a dinner table with friends, promising provocative events at home if we leave immediately, has many times caused me to manufacture some emergency that forces us to leave post haste. Likewise, private hand signals and facial expressions at a crowded party signal the same promise and I thus act accordingly.

In business meetings, a gesture or some other private signal, or simply a notable statement from a random person might cause one of the participants to say “Excuse me, I just received a text from my secretary about an urgent matter.  Would you forgive Steve and myself if we stepped outside for a brief conference call?” Once outside the two may discuss some matter involving the meeting that the remaining participants are not privy to. Business cannot exist in its current state without private communications between like-interested parties, so the “meeting outside the meeting” is a common means of getting that privacy.

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Private communications have saved my property, my businesses and even my life more times than I care to count.  On my first trip to Kathmandu as a very young man I encountered a charming and charismatic Asian man who invited me on a private trip to Pokhara to visit his family homestead.  His name, he said, was Charles Sobrage.  I was enthralled.  A gentleman sitting at the same restaurant overheard the conversation and when Charles left momentarily to visit the restroom, the gentleman leaned over and quietly said “Do not go with this man.  He will kill you and take your money.” He looked me hard in the eyes, and then he leaned back and continued his meal.  I was dumbfounded.  The man spoke with such grave conviction that I declined Charles and quickly returned to my hotel.  Sobrage was arrested a year later and charged with the murder of dozens of foreign tourists. Look it up.

Most of my private communications have not had such dramatic consequences, but discrete whispers in my ear have more than once caused me to avoid situations that might have cost me my life. As to my property, including money, I could never have acquired or maintained what I have without, literally, tens of thousands private communications.

VoiceCommand

A simple thing like an invention that has not yet been patented requires that as few people as possible know about it, and meetings between these people must be held in secure locations in absolute privacy.  While developing the world’s first software based voice recognition system, which I later named “VoiceCommand”, the developers and myself met in an abandoned warehouse in Santa Clara, California to work on the design and finalize the product.  I did not patent the product.  I instead sold it to Interstate Voice Products in Southern California for what was at the time a small fortune.  If someone had discovered the design early on by eavesdropping on these meetings, I might well have been pre-empted and all of my work would have been in vain.

So far I’ve only mentioned time honored means of private communications between people in the same room or in visual proximity.  What happens when distance, in either time or space, is involved?

Need for Privacy

Distance does not obviate the need for private communications.  This is surely self-evident.  But distance certainly complicates things.  With the advent of writing, a man could send en erotic message to his wife or private instructions to his business associates while on the Crusades, or was otherwise engaged, seal it with wax, and stamp his seal on it.  If the seal was broken upon receipt, the messenger was summarily executed. This ensured a high degree of privacy.  Few such letters have survived history, unfortunately. One such survivor is a cryptic letter from Napoleon to his wife Josephine saying simply: “Will be home in a month. Don’t bathe.”

Other early means of sending private messages, such as carrier pigeons that carried messages to one specific place, were subject to interception by talented archers and trained hawks, so they carried greater risk of being read by someone other than the intended recipient. The attempts to use technology to intercept private communications began at this point in history.  But this potential tangent we can explore at another time. Let’s return to the present day.

Sometimes we Whisper

I use Chadder as my secure messaging App.  Why? Because no-one, and no agency can possibly, ever, break into it. I know you think I’m saying this because I had a hand in it.  You are wrong.  Time will prove it.  In any case my wife also uses Chadder, so that while she is getting her hair done in the town next door she can text me some enticing suggestions, sometimes quite graphic, that motivate me to stop what I’m doing and make sure the bedroom is in romantic order.

If these enticing suggestions were to be read by someone else the world probably not come to an end.  What my wife and I do behind closed doors is perfectly legal, at least in the State of Tennessee, and there would be limited repercussions. But my private business communications, and communications between myself and my lawyers, my bankers, my political affiliates, my spiritual counselor, my product developers, my close friends, my doctors, etc. must absolutely be private, otherwise chaos would ensue.

In this age of communications that span both distance and time, the only tool we have that approximates a “whisper” is encryption. When I cannot whisper in my wife’s ear or the ears of my business partners, and have to communicate electronically, then encryption is our tool to keep our secrets secret.

If encryption is banned by David Cameron the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, or if backdoors are put into encryption products, then, from sheer embarrassment alone, a communication channel between my wife and myself – a channel that many marriage counselors deem vital to the health of a marriage – will be severed.  Can you imagine, then, the impact on the health and vitality of our world’s commerce.  And if encryption is thus controlled will we all require government’s approval to whisper into the ears of our wives, friends and business associates?  Will whisper auditor’s be the next up and coming government occupation?

My wife just texted me.  I must stop here.

Feature image used with permission: Joanna Steidle

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