reflect project 03
Is encryption a fundamental right? Should citizens of the US be allowed to have a technology that completely locks out the government?
People should be able to have technology that locks out the government. If there were a way to ensure that only the government could have access to a person’s data, I might feel differently. However, this is not the case. If you expose your data to the government, your data is vulnerable to hackers as well. While there are obvious benefits to the government being able to get at anyone’s data, the repercussions of opening up back doors are greater than the rewards.
How important of an issue is encryption to you? Does it affect who you support politically? financially? socially? Should it?
The issue of encryption is important to me, it is is not the biggest factor in deciding who I support politically, financially, or socially. There were many other factors that bear a greater weight in who I support in these senses. I don’t think that many people know much about encryption, or have very solid unchanging opinions on it, so I do not think it would be wise to base decisions on who to support on a person’s encryption stance.
In the struggle between national security and personal privacy, who will win? Are you resigned to a particular future or will you fight for it?
I don’t think there will ever really be a winner in the struggle between national security and personal privacy. There just simply must be trade off between the two, because we need both. If security “wins” we will have cameras watching us in the showers, and if privacy “wins” the cloud in the context that most people use it could not exist. Neither of these are desirable outcomes, so for our sake I hope neither of them “win”. What we really want is a little of each. We must think of this struggle between privacy and security on a case by case basis. I think the privacy/ security issue must be taken on case by case basis, and the implications of each case should be strongly considered. There is always a tradeoff. I fight for the privacy in the case of encryption, but in other cases I am in favor of more security.
Another important piece of this is public awareness, and I think this is what is really lacking at the moment. I think the general lack of understanding of the public in regards to the important privacy and security issues is the most important issue. I am not always right. I don’t trust that my opinion alone is correct in regards to important security /privacy issue, however I do believe in the ability of an informed public to make a good decision. While I will neither solely fight for security of privacy in every case, I will always fight for more public awareness.
