Why should you sign the “SECURITY FOR ALL” petition?
If news about the SECURITY FOR ALL petition hasn’t yet popped up on your Facebook timeline, or if none of your friends on social media has called your attention to it, you should definitely check it out and give it a read. It’s actually not going to rob you of more than 5 minutes. If you signed the last petition for strong encryption and against back doors, you know the drill.
So, why should you care about encryption?!
Well, would you agree to leave the keys to your home under the doormat only for the “good guys” (meaning, intelligence agencies & law enforcement)?
First of all, the only-for-the-good-guys predicament just doesn’t work. The moment you renounce your total and sovereign control over your home by leaving your keys under the doormat - above the door, or in the plant pot - pretty much anyone can find them!
Second, who the hell are the “good guys”?! Does anyone even remember the Snowden Leaks anymore? Just a reminder, then: What’s the difference between common criminals out for your money and governments with intelligence agencies out for your privacy, if they both engage in criminal activities to sabotage your life and undermine your rights and liberties? Well, common criminals are not elected governments or legitimate government entities, they don’t have unlimited budgets that come from the taxes you pay, and they can’t change or demand changes to laws in congress, etc. Anyhow, you sort of get the fairness and proportionality of the comparison. And yeah, where are the “good guys”?!
Well, this is also the way encryption keys work! Encryption keys can’t be left under the doormat — be it the front or back-door — without giving anyone with a computer and sufficient skills a very good shot at them, be it intelligence agencies or criminals. Back-doors or keys under the doormat are never safer, it means adding a built-in vulnerability that wasn’t there, and it’s essentially an invitation that criminals and foreign intelligence agencies have only been dreaming of. Let’s not forget that criminals and intelligence agencies target and take advantage of the very same vulnerabilities and exploits.
Let’s use a little imagination and some basic common sense: If we all used end-to-end encrypted communications, would that make us less or more vulnerable to the criminals and terrorists that are being used as excuse to weaken and defeat end-to-end encryption?
Exactly!
This simple mental exercise, makes it almost ridiculously clear why encryption is much more a security solution than it is a security problem.
End-to-end encryption is truly robust when as many as possible of us use it, and it’s the only thing that works, slows down and makes bulk surveillance really difficult - and expensive - for intelligence agencies, or they wouldn’t be whining about it and making all that noise. By the way, it isn’t the first time the US government and the intelligence agencies are targeting encryption, and they got voted down the last time, and informed about essentially the same dangers and by almost the same security experts and technologists that are fighting off their demands today.
Edward Snowden, in his first published interview, with the Guardian, when he was in Hong-Kong, said something quite significant: “Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things you can rely on. Unfortunately end-point security is so terrifically weak the NSA can frequently find ways around it”. So, in other words, how the NSA mostly defeats cryptography is not by breaking it, but by getting around it.
If government and intelligence agencies get it their way, they will not only legalize and legitimize spying on us - which they partly already have -, they will more importantly, technologically implement it.
Right now, encryption is the strongest and most robust defense and protection we have against both common criminals and criminal governments, and that is exactly why it’s under attack. If we lose it, there will not be much more left to lose when it comes to securing our right to privacy, the basic judicial principles that depend on it, and the fundamental democratic guarantees that these judicial principles represent.
End-to-end encryption makes bulk surveillance a lot more difficult and expensive, and it forces intelligence agencies to focus on their real job: target individual subjects who they have real probable cause to eavesdrop on, vs targeting all of us for no legitimate reasons or any legally admissible rationale. Moreover, by now we all know about the negligible benefits and meager results produced by wholesale surveillance and signals intelligence since 9/11. They basically amount to a huge waste of resources and tax money, which all went into harming us who fund it, rather than catching the bad guys.
Do we want to support the illegal spying of all of us, the criminal breach of everyone’s privacy, along with the many other civil liberties and judicial principles that are inextricably tied to it? Do we seriously want to live in a world where hiding from intelligence agencies and criminals, who will target us through the exact same vulnerabilities, becomes the norm, and while we simultaneously finance and perpetuate the violation of our own rights and the complete destruction of democracy with our tax money? Is that a world in which we can feel secure and free, is that a democracy at all?
“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide, is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say” - E. Snowden
One of the primary lessons we all learned from the Snowden leaks, is that privacy is not a privilege, and that it’s not about the ability to “go dark” in order to engage in criminal activities. Unless of course you understand people entering their homes, locking their doors and shutting their blinds as “going dark”, and living their lives without having to invite anybody else to it, as criminal activity. Privacy is a right and even though we are not engaging in any criminal activity while enjoying our privacy, it doesn’t mean we want to invite intelligence agencies all over the world to be silent observers of our conversations or actions, both intimate and trivial. Having the autonomy to decide how we wish to present ourselves, is essential to how we set the boundaries that define our privacy, and being robbed of that autonomy has an inevitable impact.
Saying you don’t have anything to hide and don’t care about surveillance, is something you’ll definitely rethink once you read a little bit about what is being surveilled and how, and most importantly, when you start connecting the dots about why. But it should already matter to you, once you remember what our civil liberties and rights give us and how they enable us. Democracy is not a given, and as you can see, it’s a lot easier to lose it than to establish it and make it work.
What our rights and liberties are, is something we are mostly not aware of, and that most of us are not able to recite or enumerate at the top of our head. We don’t really notice the rights we have and how they enable us to be and do all those things that make up who we are, until we lose them. When that happens in the universe of rights and liberties, it’s usually too late or very hard and costly to reverse. It took centuries and a whole lot of struggle to secure and establish the rights we have today, and the principles of our democracy, and we can honestly not remind ourselves enough about it, nor should we stop doing it.
That’s part of why our rights are - or at least should be - taught in schools, and something we should never stop caring about and losing perspective of. Knowing our rights and what it took to establish them, is very much part of our education, and we can easily tell why they should stick better than multiplication tables, because just as our security, our rights and securing them, is a constant battle and a process, not a switch you can simply toggle on and off and forget about. Protecting our rights and liberties, is more a mindset than a set of fixed assumptions, and which depends on education, constant vigilance, political awareness and the intelligent formation of strong and robust moral and ethical criteria.
Stating our indifference towards wholesale surveillance and unwarranted intrusion of our privacy only speaks for our own political and moral apathy. We shouldn’t speak for others who might actually want to maintain and enjoy their right to privacy, which is also inextricably tied to some of the most important basic judicial principles, such as presumption of innocence, the right not to be searched or have your possessions seized - your data is also part of your belongings -, the right to a fair trial, the right to due process, the right to attorney/client privilege and confidentiality, the right to non-self incrimination, etc.
These fundamental rights and basic judicial principles are already under attack by the secret collaboration between agencies, suchs as the DEA, FBI, NSA, etc., sharing and using illegally obtained data from mass surveillance, and which is called Parallel Construction. There are even Secret Courts like FISA and FISC making Secret Rulings on Secret Laws! Secret Rulings that can actually supersede those made by legitimate courts. The whole surveillance apparatus is hiding behind institutionalized secrecy, that has completely eliminated any form of transparency, and these practices and overreach have undermined the Justice system and the Political system, as both the public and the US congress are incapable of providing oversight, rendering accountability impossible. You can probably imagine how end-to-end encryption fits into this predicament, and why it’s so paramount to defend it. You also get the idea of why, and to whom, encryption constitutes as security problem in this context.
Encryption isn’t a security problem; it’s a security solution.
So, can we do anything other than sign petitions to try and put an end to illegal, unlawful and illegitimate - yeah, they’re different - wholesale surveillance of the NSA, GCHQ, ASIS, NZSIS, CSIS, Mossad, etc., and all the other intelligence agencies and criminals that share or piggyback on the same signals intelligence, vulnerabilities and exploits?
Yes indeed, you can! There are plenty of user friendly, streamlined and FREE end-to-end encryption products - both as in “free beer” and as in “freedom“ - such as anonymity tools like Tor, entire Operating Systems like Qubes or Tails, encrypted Calls & SMS services such as Signal, encrypted services for journalists and whistleblowers such as SecureDrop and Leap, encrypted e-mail services like Tutanota, ProtonMail, ScryptMail, UnSeen, Sendittothenet, etc., and even a bunch of affordable VPNs like PIA, Mullvad and NordVPN. There’s a huge bunch of browser add-ons and plugins that block corporate tracking, Javascript and supercookies, like HTTPS everywhere, Privacy Badger, Disconnect.me, Ghostery, NoScript, etc., and even ways to check how vulnerable you are, like Panopticlick, BrowserSpy and DNSleaktest. There is also tons of information at thesimplecomputer.info, TorrentFreak, The Intercept, The Register, EFF, Boing-Boing, Schneier on Security, Micah Lee’s Blog, Surveillance Studies.org, Open Technology Institute, Electronic Privacy Information Center (epic), Freedom of the Press Foundation, Privacy International, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), cybersec101, TechRepublic, the Surveillance Studies Network, the Surveillance Studies Centre, The Guardian Project, Statewatch.org, Snowden and the Future, the ubiquitous surveillance society, Surveillance & Society, the Snowden Surveillance Archive, the FreedomBox Foundation, John Gilmore, Eben Moglen, etc., not to mention the tons of entertaining conferences and TEDtalks available on youtube and Vimeo, from guys like Edward Snowden, Jacob Appelbaum, Bruce Schneier, Cory Doctorow, Richard Stallman, Moxie Marlinspike, Glenn Greenwald, David Lyon, Eben Moglen, Mikko Hyppönen, Lawrence Lessig, etc. There’s even some weird and perhaps not so cool stuff like PrivaTegrity in development, and by no less than online anonymity pioneer, David Chaum. You can support encrypting websites and Apps with the really great Reset the Net project. And there’s of course some open hardware available and in development, involving computers that are built from the ground up to offer more security and respect your privacy, like the Novena, and the Librem.
In other words, there’s really NO EXCUSES not to be safer, to take care of your digital self, and to care for those you love. If people can even come up with Art projects about surveillance, then you can definitely do something about it too. Talking about it with other people you care about - as I’m doing through this article right now - is doing more than you think.
Watching tons of videos about it - if reading isn’t your thing - is another great way to do something. The more you understand, the better you will be able to protect your own rights and those of others, and as you learn, you will most certainly involve others. This is, as I said, a process, and as such, it involves learning and constantly sharing experiences and knowledge. All good things.
If the intelligence agencies think they are above the law and think that the rule of law, transparency, oversight and accountability doesn’t apply to them, it’s partly because we have forgotten the importance of our civil liberties and rights, how they are both part and pillars of democracy, and also about the right and responsibility that we have to decide what government, law enforcement and intelligence agencies should do with our tax money.
Let’s keep the keys to our lives in our own pockets, and let’s reassert our right to privacy as one of the many essential and necessary pillars of democracy. Let’s defend encryption, privacy, an open Internet and democracy!
As we have proven we can change things and hold our ground, many times before, let’s do it again! Ultimately, this is the one issue for which I can safely say that to change the world, you just have to change yourself - and your digital habits - a little… and start encrypting.
