When people buy homes, they expect that the various entries to the home have sufficient security in place. There are locks on the windows, locks on the doors, maybe even a security system. How much trust one puts into the basic security of a home depends on what that one feels a perpetrator might do to circumvent the elements. I ask you: How much faith would you have in the security of a home if there was a master lock in place that has a special key that opens everything? Probably not a big deal, maybe even convenient (for some), but let’s say that key wasn’t for you to use.

It’s all for safety you see, the greater safety of all. Let’s put that key in the hands of the neighborhood police. Let’s say it was in the hands of the city, the tax agency, under the power of the town council, and there was a copy at the fire department. You know, to be “safe.”

Let’s further add that the key lets the mysterious user into your home without you even knowing it happened. When you were asleep, when you’re not home, when you’re at home, when you’re on vacation. And after all this, they don’t even have to state why the home was entered in the first place.

If that key got into the wrong hands or someone replicated it or found some way to defeat the master function, everyone would be affected and the illusion of security would fall apart. That’s the problem with the backdoor encryption that government officials keep talking about. It is just not safe by any stretch of the imagination, and the purpose of this continued desire is to spy on its own citizens.

By edict or by force

If you listen closely, you can hear the drumbeat building, and it will not be long before the government forces these keys on us. One by one, they will go after the weakest coalitions in order and enforce their ways.

We should be shocked at the current, sustained push for encryption back doors. The culprits in this bizarre dance always seem to be the same voices. The latest back door key pusher came from none other than the House Homeland Security Committee, through its chairman, Michael McCaul (R-Texas). Speaking on the CBS Corp. (CBS) show Face the Nation, he stated that the biggest threat today is the “idea that terrorists can communicate in dark space.” He also griped about not being able to see what terrorists are saying. Contrast this with the recent report from a CIA newsletter that stated that “sheer luck” was needed to extract useful infos about an identified target amidst a sea of surveillance data. Sheer luck. Billions of dollars. Privacy violated. Those phrases deserve separate sentences.

On the heels of the atrocities committed in France on November 13, 2015, where 130 people were killed, it is sadly predictable that this would be among the first responses. Without a shred of evidence, the finger has been pointed to encryption as the culprit.

“Officials have said it’s likely the ISIS [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] followers behind the deadly strikes likely arranged their strategy via some type of encrypted communication, although no direct evidence has been presented to back up these suspicions,” according to an article posted on The Hill.

Preposterous and foolhardy. In the name of all rational thought, it is not possible to create a back door to encryption tools without affecting the security of all. The bottom line is that the government wants to break these tools for good, and who can blame it? It has acted with impunity on surveillance, and it wants to squash the very few things that people can do to protect themselves from its all-seeing eye.

ISIS-ware

None of this would stop ISIS from using encryption. Let’s imagine the government runs the table on back doors to encryption tools. By edict, it passes a law in the open or in secret that forces keys to be created and be put in possession of the government. Then what?

One thing for certain is that the community would rise and create their own encryption standard that few would know about. ISIS could do the same. Five starving hackers in a programming sweatshop could turn out a new encryption standard that nobody would have the keys for.

I wonder, who would lose in that situation? The people would lose, pure and simple.

Encryption is one of the most important tools that protect our digital sovereignty. It is akin to our right to bear arms. If the government takes our security tools, even for the sake of greater security itself, we lose our identity.

Find out more about my platform at www.mcafee16.com.

Photo credit: Kris Krug