War in the UK from encryption is dangerous

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Imagine that the government tells about the automotive company secretly weaken the brake effectiveness on all the cars it sells, recklessly deepening the safety of millions. This would be incredibly undermining public safety.

Unfortunately, this is what is happening in the UK in cybersecurity, where Apple was forced to deprive vital privacy and protection of the end to the end of encryption from the reserve storage service and infrastructure with considerable vulnerability.

Apple is not a villain here. It was not a choice made slightly. The company has invested billions of dollars in cryptographic research and development and sell itself as a privacy company.

But Apple was toward Basic Privacy TechnologyDeliberately engineering vulnerabilities not only in the UK but also on the world scale to give government a “rear door” access to encrypted client repositories.

The government also ordered the company to tell anyone using the so -called “Snoopers” to keep the order and the security degradation that it provided secret.

Instead of performing, the apple deprived of encryption only from backups in the UK and launched Legal complaint. It is a decrease in damage, but still harmful. When you are in the UK, your iCloud backups are full of things as sensitive business documents, intimate photos, evidence and financial records – now vulnerable to hacking, violations, thefts and hostile governments requests that Apple may not resist.

For those outside the UK, the news is still bad. Communication does not remain within jurisdiction. All you have shared with your friends or peers in the UK is now lacking the end. The photo you sent to your friends or the confidential information you shared with the counterparty is now vulnerable.

If this can be subjected to Apple, we should also pause and shudder when we think what other technology companies may have received such a secret order, and instead of fighting, silently. In particular, business managers need to be concerned about what it can mean to them, and the trust they are in cloud servers, software and other critical systems that can secretly undergo a reckless threat.

The UK is part of a dangerous trend that threatens cybersecurity of our global infrastructure. Legislators in Sweden recently proposed a law that would make communication providers build a back door vulnerability. France is ready to make the same mistake when voting for the inclusion of “ghost participants” in safe conversations through the back doors. Chat control is pursued by Brussels.

Main infrastructure such as air traffic control, medical devices and emergency operations are based on computing and software. Thus, the use of strong encryption to protect security and privacy is a issue of national security.

The threat is not hypothetical. Last year, the US government showed that salt typhoon attacks on American telecommunications systems, which have national hackers related to China, received access to call records, text messages and other intimate information of millions of Americans. Potential victims included President Donald Trump. How did the hackers do it? They exploit the “rear door” built into telecommunications systems.

The fundamental question is simple: encryption is a mathematics, and mathematics does not discriminate against the state investigator and the criminal hacker – the back door, and if it is there, everyone can enter.

The game also has a contradiction. If politicians dream of making the UK technology center, they do not have to work to blow up the basics of cybersecurity on which a able -bodied technological industry rests.

The government must withdraw its wrong mandate. Instead of unexpectedly cutting the brake cables on the technology car, it must work on strengthening the safety and privacy of the technology that forms the nervous system of our world. Business executives should also take on the role, making it clear that these dangerous steps are invalid, and pushing companies that they licensize technology from the deployment of encryption, and other protection, without which their interests and interesting customers will be vulnerable.

We have conceded so many basic operations of our lives and institutions in technology, we must admit that strong encryption is not an enemy of security – this or Security. The argument that weakening of the encryption will make any of us more secure, as wrong as dangerous.