Why it matters if the government can access your data

The murders in San Bernardino were a heinous act of violence; we’ll be mourning those we lost for a long time to come. The recent news about the FBI’s demands for Apple to create a tool to unlock the iPhones of the San Bernardino shooters has a lot of people frustrated. Many feel the government should be able to access our devices — which hold enormous amounts of personal information — if only to protect the greater good.

Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario. Say for the sake of argument that a serial liar and narcissist is elected to be our President. Someone who is obsessed with power and who has zero compassion for anyone who gets in his way. Someone who might very willingly put immigrants in camps and who stifles protestors without a second thought. He doesn’t care about gun violence, or police brutality, or the indignities of being poor. He doesn’t try to dissolve hate but nurtures it. He uses fear and hatred of others to control the population. We’re encouraged to report on each other.

Suppose also that our Congress is overrun by cruel politicians. They have no respect for the rule of law, for checks and balances, for hundreds of years of legal precedent. Working together with this President they are able to nominate judges to the Supreme Court to help weaken laws that protect the people, the economy, and the environment.

Of course all of this wouldn’t happen overnight. And maybe it’s a slow boil: at first it doesn’t really impact you.

Eventually your kid gets lead poisoning from the city water, or your sister with mental health problems dies in police custody, or your fiancé is shot dead by a jealous coworker. Maybe you’re just “guilty” of being black. Or your Muslim neighbor is hauled off in the middle of the night.

When you tell your coworkers about it they are numb to it. You want change, you want to hold people accountable. You have zero recourse. So you decide you need to protest in the Capital and go online to start organizing.

Here’s where the real trouble starts. Anyone organizing against the establishment is labeled a terrorist. We’re told these are anti-American citizens who must be monitored and contained.

You can’t do anything online without being tracked. You try to organize protests but the police are always one step ahead of you. They fire tear gas at you, they beat you, they arrest you.

The government has access to your data. It’s easy for them to fabricate crimes and twist evidence against you. This has already happened to citizens by mistake: imagine what it would be like if they were actively trying to suppress you. They can listen to you in your home, they can read what’s on your phone. You have no way of proving yourself innocent because you can’t use encryption to protect your information to counter their claims. Maybe there’s room in those camps for one more.

Now what? It seems far-fetched, right? Maybe this would happen in China but certainly not in the Western world. Except this pattern of suppression and false conviction has been happening for hundreds of years.

The Tudors and the Stuarts used the courts to suppress dissidents. There was little protection from search or seizure in the Colonies. In 1918 the Sedition Act was passed in the United States. The law barred anyone from speaking negatively about the Government or the war and was used to jail citizens for years. Look at East Germany or McCarthyism or the Vietnam war. All times when governments relied on extraordinary powers to spy on the people and squash those who challenge the establishment.

Our country was founded on the basis that the people should be free from tyranny. Our right to liberty is meant to insulate us from unchecked power. Our technology changes but our fundamental principles haven’t. Don’t trade your liberty for false promises of security.

Other countries look to US law for inspiration. If we weaken our device encryption — or if these proposed tools were to fall into the wrong hands — then criminals (and less benevolent governments) will abuse them to no end. Meanwhile, terrorists and criminals still have access to unbreakable encryption tools created outside the United States.

Increasingly our phones serve as a second method of authentication to access critical computer systems. The FBI may be well-intentioned, but the ramifications of what they are looking to do will put lives at risk for years to come. Power plant workers could be hacked, or the fingerprints of government employees could be stolen, or maybe even airline computers could be compromised. We need stronger encryption, not weaker.

Make your voice heard. Take the time to call or write your congressional representatives. Be polite but make it clear that breaking device encryption won’t prevent bad actors from using foreign encryption tools and it risks the exposure of all US citizens’ data.