UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd has demanded that online services stop using working cryptography in their products, and instead leave all your communications vulnerable to interception by criminals, governments, businesses and spies.
Her argument is that "normal people" don't use Whatsapp because it is secure, but rather, because it is convenient, and thus the only people who value security are abnormal and presumably up to no good.
Here's a brief history of the rhetoric of the backdoor wars:
* "No one wants crypto, you can tell because none of the platforms are deploying it. If crypto was something normal people cared about, you'd see it in everyone's products. You crypto advocates are weird and out-of-step." (Clipper Chip – San Bernardino)
* "Companies are all using crypto. They are being irresponsible. Sure, everyone wants crypto and adding it to a product helps you sell it, but that's just profiteering while reducing our common security." (San Bernardino – This week)
* "Companies are all using crypto. But no one wants it. The fact that every major platform has rolled out working, end-to-end cryptography tells us nothing about the preferences of their customers. They're wasting their shareholders' money on working security that no one wants, while reducing our common security." (Last week – ??)
Next: some company will cave to Rudd and lose all their business to a competitor with working crypto. Then Rudd will say:
* "Sure, everyone wants working crypto, but you can't always get what you want. Look at Sellout.com, plc: they caved to our demands to eliminate security and got destroyed in the market. We must defend the good corporate stewardship of Sellout.com, plc by punishing their competitors for not joining them in the race to the bottom."
UK home secretary Amber Rudd says 'real people' don't need end-to-end encryption
[Rob Price/Business Insider]
(via /.)
(Image: Emojione, CC-BY-SA; Chris McAndrew, CC-BY;
