In Defense of Encryption

Breaking encryption is like tearing open a letter in transit; client-side scanning Is like someone reading over your shoulder as you write it.

- Sally Wentworth

Encryption, the simple act of scrambling data so that it cannot be read by third parties, keeps us, our loved ones, and our communities safe by protecting everything from private messages to online-banking details and medical records.

It is the foundation of trust in our digital society, as crucial for personal security as it is for national security.

Despite this, encryption is under unprecedented threat from established democracies, which are inadvertently paving a dangerous path that the world’s autocrats are only too eager to follow. Specifically, policymakers in these countries often present strong encryption as being at odds with effective law enforcement. But this is a false choice. The reality is that we need legislation that protects people online while also maintaining the security infrastructure that safeguards our data. These goals are not mutually exclusive.

Policymakers continue to claim that creating “backdoors” for law enforcement — exceptional government access to encrypted communications — is necessary to help catch criminals. But cybersecurity research has consistently demonstrated the impossibility of building a backdoor that only the “good guys” can use. A backdoor is a backdoor.

The Salt Typhoon case, in which a Chinese government-supported hacker group gained access to US telecom systems by exploiting backdoors originally created for American law enforcement and intelligence agencies, should have sufficed to show that there is no way to control who exploits engineering vulnerabilities built into a system. However noble their aims, such tools will inevitably become a weapon that criminals, hostile state actors, and malicious hackers can abuse.