Are you ready for a fully encrypted internet?

Encryption is one of the most important issues of our time. The great Julian Assange discussed it in his book Cypherpunks, of which I had the pleasure of writing the prologue to the Spanish edition, describing it as the key technology that could allow us to fight against our governments’ increasingly repressive use of the internet, which is leading us toward an Orwellian future.

Now Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO has raised the issue again, saying: “Weakening encryption or taking it away harms good people who are using it for the right reason.” the company, which is committed to privacy, is being portrayed by the US security agencies as blocking its investigations when in fact there are just nine such cases.

But Apple is not alone in defending encryption as a vital technology. Facebook has just introduced an option that allows encryption through PGP in the mails it sends its users, which has been dismissed in some quarters as largely symbolic: few people know now to use PGP, many confuse their public password with the private one, and others that once had a password because it looked very modern on their page, have forgotten where they put the other half. That said, the move could help improve the usability of PGP and make it more accessible to the average user, something that Google has been working on for some time.

It is exactly one year since the company announced the End-to-End extension for Chrome, which is designed to make encryption easier to use. The extension is still in test mode on GitHub and still not available from the Chrome Web Store, but it is an initiative that adds to others such as giving priority to pages that encrypt their traffic through https.

Apple, Facebook, Google, or even Kim Dotcom and Mega, which has been trying to turn encryption into a mass product for the last three years, or Barack Obama, who is on record as saying that he sees encryption as essential, or the German government, which is trying to convince its citizens to use strong encryption… it is increasingly looking like 2015 is going to be the year when end-to-end encryption takes off. Governments like that of the United Kingdom are in the minority: and their efforts to weaken or undermine encryption will soon be exposed as either ignorant, malicious, or anti-freedom.

What are the implications of an internet in which almost all traffic is fully encrypted? To begin with, let’s park our paranoia: the criminals and terrorists have been using powerful end-to-end encryption programs for some time, and will continue to do so. Encryption has nothing to do with security, and much more to do with censorship and control.

Needless to say, there are still questions that need to be answered: we need to know what role the telecoms companies will play. Many of them have been working with government agencies for too long. How will privacy develop in a world in which the most casual conversations and innocent internet use will be subject to robust cyphering. We’re talking about a very different world to today’s. The internet will only start to grow up when it is used as a tool for freedom, and not some gigantic machine for spying on us. And we are still a long way from that point.