Encryption might be the one thing we have left.

In the news right now is the story of Apple being told by a judge that they have to provide the FBI with a way to get access to the data inside an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters in the San Bardino attacks in the USA.  The issue seems to revolve around encryption and encrypted data and, in this case a US government agencies wish to be able to access that data.  What follows if they win will surely be a requirement for every tech company to comply with any requests to provide access to encrypted data.  If it happens in the US then it will doubtless happen here in the UK and pretty much everywhere else on the planet.

If they could be trusted to only ever access information when a crime has been committed or when there were reasonable grounds to suspect that one was being committed, and then that data was accessed with judicial oversight it wouldn’t be so bad, but unless you are grossly naive you must know that will never happen.

The UK governments spooks at GCHQ have been hoovering up data from the UK and much of the worlds internet traffic for years and yet I wonder how many terrorist plots were actually foiled as a direct result?  I’m sure there were some, and I congratulate the hard working ladies and gents of those government agencies that keep us safe, but how many things happened despite the masses of data being gathered?

I’m sorry but even though I know they are supposed to be acting to protect us, I don’t trust the powers that be not to abuse the power that is within their elected and un-elected hands.  A line in the sand needs to be drawn and I hope Apple wins their fight, but I doubt they will.

Meanwhile, the safest place for your data, dear reader, appears to be inside your head.  For now, at least, they don’t have access to that.  But wait – before you rush off to dump the contents of your phone back into your head, bear this in mind.  Facebook, Google and others are apparently providing data to the US government, and doubtless in doing so, other governments.  That being the case, think about what they are providing.  On social media platforms we share our thoughts, our photos, our contacts our lives.  That information can be used to build up a very interesting profile.

Combine that with our phone records, our browsing habits, our banking data, our employment data, our tax records and so on and now you have a very useful database of information.  If you actually thought for a minute about the information we willingly share online and combine that with the information that can be obtained about us from all other sources we interact with, then you realise that they can probably predict what we are going to do long before we do it.  Disturbing don’t you think?

Those pesky encrypted communications though – they really must get in they way of all that.  Long may they continue…