“Without encryption, we will lose all privacy. This is our new battlefield. ”
- Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden is a former CIA employee and an informant, author of The Personal File. He is president of the board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
“If the Internet traffic is not encrypted, any government, company or criminal can notice this. They will steal a copy of it and your data will be stored with them forever. "
Light is on in every country in the world, shelves are clogged with goods, dams are closed, and transport is moving. All this thanks to computer security. The United States conducted a global threat intelligence assessment of the United States. For more than five years now, the first place in the US Global Threat Assessment report has been held by the vulnerability of our computers and computer networks — higher than the threat of terrorism and the threat of war. Your card balance, local hospital equipment, and the US presidential election in 2020, among other things, depend on computer security.
We are now experiencing the greatest computer security crisis in history. And yet, the US government, along with the governments of Great Britain and Australia, are trying to undermine the importance of encryption. Encryption is the only method for the reliable protection of information in the world. If they succeed, our public infrastructure and privacy will be in jeopardy.
Simply put, encryption is a method of protecting information. It is the primary way to secure digital communications. The Internet is becoming increasingly hostile. At the same time, he remembers everything - your every email, every word entered in the search bar, every nonsense you did on the Internet. Earlier this month, the United States, along with the UK and Australia, called on Facebook to create a backdoor in their encrypted messengers. He would give anyone with the key to this back door unlimited access to personal correspondence. That would be a fatal mistake. Facebook still does not want to do this.
If the Internet traffic is not encrypted, any government, company or criminal can notice this. They will steal a copy of it and your data will be stored with them forever. However, if you encrypt this traffic, your information cannot be read. Only those who have a special decryption key can decrypt it.
I know something about this because for a while I managed part of the US National Security Agency's global surveillance system. In June 2013, I worked with reporters to show the world this system from the inside.
Without encryption, I could not write a story about how all this happened. Only in this way was I able to safely transport the manuscript of my book “Personal Affairs” across the border. Despite the fact that I myself can not cross it. Encryption helps everyone do their job — reporters, dissidents, activists, NGO workers and informants, doctors, lawyers, and politicians. We are talking not only about the most dangerous and repressive countries in the world, but also about every single country.
When I divulged the information in 2013 , the US government not only passively monitored Internet traffic as it crossed the network. They found ways to engage US technology companies in collaboration. Sometimes they penetrated their internal networks. At that time, only a small portion of web traffic was encrypted. Six years later, Facebook, Google and Apple made encryption the main part of their products by default. As a result, about 80% of web traffic today is encrypted. Even former US intelligence director James Klapper believes that exposing mass surveillance has promoted the commercial implementation of encryption. As a result, the Internet is becoming a safer place. Too safe, according to some governments.
Attorney General Donald Trump William Barr approved one of the very first mass surveillance programs , without thinking about whether this is legal. Now he announces his intention to stop the progress of the last six years or even return to the starting point. WhatsApp, a Facebook -based messenger, already uses end-to-end encryption (E2EE) . In March, the company announced its intention to include E2EE in Facebook Messenger and Instagram. Barr launches a public campaign to keep Facebook from taking the next step in digital security. It all started with an open letter signed by Barr, British Secretary of the Interior Preity Patel, Australian Secretary of the Interior, and US Secretary of Homeland Security. The letter demanded that Facebook reject its encryption offers.
If Barra’s campaign is successful, billions of messages will be in a state of constant insecurity. Users are purposely put in a vulnerable position. Personal correspondence will be available not only to investigators in the United States, Great Britain and Australia, but also to the special services of China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Not to mention hackers all over the world.
End-to-end encrypted communications systems are designed so that messages can only be read by senders and their intended recipients. They can be read even if they are encrypted. These messages are stored by an unreliable third party. For example, a company like Facebook .
E2EE is much better than old security systems. In this system, keys that unlock any message are stored only on certain devices at the communication endpoints. If you send a message, the key will be stored on the phones of the sender or recipient of the message. Intermediaries who own various Internet platforms cannot do anything. Accordingly, these keys cannot be stolen in case of massive leakage of corporate data. Such leaks occur frequently and damage our safety. E2EE allows companies such as Facebook, Google or Apple to protect their users from close attention. Using this system, companies guarantee that they will no longer own the keys to our personal conversations. They can no longer be called an all-seeing eye. A blind courier will know more about you than these corporations.
We live in a strange world. Facebook is a potentially dangerous company. A company that publicly says that it wants to implement a technology that will protect users. At the same time, Facebook is limiting its own capabilities for the benefit of other people. And the US government vehemently protests against this. This is because it will become more difficult for the government to follow Facebook’s privacy because of the whims of Facebook.
To justify its disagreement with encryption, the US government, as usual, uses the tale of the dark forces living on the network. The government claims they need to find terrorists, drug dealers and those responsible for child abuse. Of course, they cannot do this without full access to the full history of each person's activities on Facebook. In fact, crimes are never discussed on public platforms, especially American ones. Criminals know that these platforms use the most sophisticated automatic filters and all available reporting methods.
In fact, the governments of the United States, Britain and Australia want to abandon end-to-end encryption not because of public safety, but rather because of power. We send and receive many messages. E2EE gives us and the devices we use special control over them. Companies and other third parties through which these messages pass no longer have control. Because of this, state oversight should become more focused and methodical, rather than promiscuous and universal.
This change entails only one risk - the ability of countries to spy on the population on a massive scale. They will have to use a method more difficult than paper work. The government should limit the number of personal records and confidential messages owned by companies. So we will return to the classical methods of investigation. These methods are not only effective, but also respect human rights, in contrast to total supervision. In that case, we will be safe. We will be free.
Translation: Diana Sheremyeva
Publishing support - Edison , a company that is developing an electronic medical examination system .