rhowarth

Think this debate through to its logical conclusion, with unconstrained use of strong encryption in every aspect of communication. Every packet of data and every financial transaction is unbreakably encrypted and goes through anonymising routers, and everything is completely untraceable.

Your child goes missing after chatting to someone online, your employer goes bust because they're defrauded out of millions, a major terrorist outrage, organised crime on an industrial scale, a huge increase in taxes for honest folk because half the population has decided they'd rather be paid in untraceable bitcoins... and the police just shrug their shoulders and say there's nothing they can do. Even if they have a strong suspect for a major crime and have a cast iron search warrant, there is no possible way to check their assets, see who they've been in communication with, tap their phone, see where they spent their money or where they got their money, or collect any evidence of any kind other than physically following people and catching someone in the act of committing a physical crime.

Imagine a hypothetical drug baron, controlling an empire worth millions from his laptop. It's an office job, perfectly safe as he never needs to get anywhere remotely close to the action. He buys stuff online, places an ad online to recruit couriers "local deliveries, high rates of pay, no questions asked", they pick stuff up, pass it on to street dealers (similarly recruited online), who meet the customer (responding to an online ad) in a pub somewhere and just press a button on their Apple Watch to make the electronic payment as the goods are handed over. Within seconds the funds are transferred all the way back to our drug baron's account, completely untraceably. Sure, a few lowly foot soldiers might be caught occasionally with something in their possession, but the chance of ever finding where the money went, or that a payment was even made, are nil.

Sure, some technologically literate criminals will already be covering their tracks this way, but they're still very much in a minority, and they're still likely to make mistakes in other areas that mean they could in principle still be caught.

But let's take things further. Encrypted virtual machines, say. Imagine your iPhone has two PINs, one to unlock your everyday innocent account where you chat to your mum and your girlfriend, one to unlock the account where you commit all your criminal deeds. Even if you're arrested and comply with a lawful court order to unlock your phone or computer, you just give them the day to day one and there's no way to even tell there's anything else on your device or you've been communicating with anyone other than your day to day contacts, still less unlock it or see who you've been communicating with.

Farfetched? Hardly. Technologically we're there already, but it's not quite ubiquitous everywhere just yet. It's difficult to see how the lives of ordinary citizens or society as a whole will be improved when it is though.

Sure, we might get some smug self satisfaction at how clever we are to understand cryptography and the thought that "they" (the government and FBI and NSA and GCHQ et al.) can't read the messages we send to our girlfriends (without bothering to wonder why on earth they might want to, when they presumably have better things to do with their time, or considering the irony that we're all perfectly happy to freely reveal all our innermost secrets to the likes of Google and Facebook and Amazon!).

It's far from obvious that the long term risks of ubiquitous unbreakable encryption won't outweigh its benefits. The genie may already be out of the bottle but that is something to be lamented, not celebrated.