The Internet Is Going Dark
If you create encryption, it makes it harder for the American government to do its job — while protecting civil liberties — to make sure that evildoers aren’t in our midst… We need to find a new arrangement with Silicon Valley in this regard because I think this is a very dangerous kind of situation.
• From article in The Intercept entitled Jeb Bush Comes Out Against Encryption.
I am not partisan — neither Democrat, nor Republican — but what Jeb Bush is advocating is simply naive, and demonstrates a failure to understand this inevitable technological and social trend.
I am not an expert, but I do actively study cryptography. I write code in Go and other programming languages which takes full advantage in state-of-the-art strong encryption, so I probably understand encryption better than most. I use encryption defensively to protect websites and web services against attack and surveillance. I’m also well-versed in ‘penetration testing’ — often called ‘hacking’ — to offensively test the security of those same websites and web services.
Jeb Bush’s conclusions regarding encryption are fundamentally flawed, because they ignore one simple inevitable fact.
The Internet is going dark.
What does “going dark” mean? It means that because we are arriving at the dawn of a new era — an era defined by the pervasiveness and ubiquity of strong encryption on a global scale — all intercepted Internet traffic will soon be unreadable.
This is already a rapidly-evolving global trend, and even if powerhouse companies in Silicon Valley like Apple and Google wanted to, they could not stop this trend from eventually being realized— no matter what the politicians and the NSA try to claim. The reason this trend is unstoppable is that strong encryption is freely available around the globe, and everyone now knows that they are being spied upon by everyone else — both friend and foe. This is the legacy of Edward Snowden.
In the years ahead, everyone in the world will be using strong encryption for everything they do. Many of us already are. Oftentimes, that strong encryption will be end-to-end, meaning that interception requires attacking the endpoints, which is prohibitively expensive for mass surveillance. (Works for targets in the thousands — maybe even millions — but not billions.)
Let’s explore a hypothetical.
The Five Eyes intelligence alliance consists of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. If those governments were to require “encryption back-doors” in hardware and software so that law enforcement and intelligence agencies could surveil the communications and activities of every person and company within their jurisdiction, it would affect only 6.2% of the world’s population.
The other 93.8% of the world’s population includes Russia, China, Japan, Germany, France, India, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, South Korea, North Korea… The list is long, and many of these states have world-class technical and cryptographic talent. The idea that the Five Eyes have a lock on technical prowess is nothing short of ridiculous.
Knowing that they are targets of ubiquitous mass surveillance, these actors in the other 93.8% will inevitably utilize strong encryption to protect themselves — a tactic available to everyone at virtually zero cost, and which significantly reduces the profitability of ubiquitous mass surveillance.
I’m not even addressing the enormous risks of mandating backdoors in encryption products, which is well understood and strongly opposed by leading cryptographers. Eventually, all backdoors become available to all sophisticated cryptographic actors.
Jeb Bush — and others on either side of the partisan aisle, who share his perspective on mass surveillance — should stop attempting to salvage the methods of the past four decades. Those methods are rapidly becoming obsolete, and are ultimately doomed to failure. Instead, they need to recognize that the spy game has fundamentally changed. Profitable mass surveillance is coming to the end of its useful, profitable life.
You can’t put this genie back in the bottle.
