Meet Bob, Alice and Grace … The Ghost in the Machine

Let The Greatest Digital Debate of the 21st Century Begin

The security of the Internet is basically a shambles. It is the main reason that Cybercrime thrives — there’s no authentication placed on email and there’s little in the way of security placed on the data. It was never really designed with security in mind, and is just a bunch of cobbled-together protocols. When it was found that there was a problem in that someone could read our communications, we basically just stuck an encryption tunnel from one machine to the other — and that was it. Protocols such as PGP failed because the lacked a real drive to properly secure email.

And so we are nearing the end game for security, with — end-to-end encryption and encryption-by-default. But for the first time in human history, our security forces are left with a way to conduct surveillance. And so the greatest digital debate of the 21st Century involves the rights to privacy against the rights for society to protect itself. For some, we need ways to mass harvest data, in case we need it in the future against someone who is a threat to our society.

It is end-to-end encryption which worries law enforcement the most, in that it is almost completely unbreakable. An agency such as GCHQ has a bit of a dilemma. One the one hand…