The governments do not destroy the encryption 04/15/25

Written by: Jessica Dickenson Godman* and Ezequiel Passeron Kitroser **

Washington DC/Barcelona. Suppose that a stranger wants a picture of your son. If the year is 1750, you can request an artist; He was knocking on his door and asking for permission to draw it and you can reject it.

If it was 1850, I was able to rent a Daguereotipist, who will ask the child to remain fixed while a mixture of Mercury Light and Steam is recorded on a polished silver copper plate. Again, you can refuse.

If the year 1950, a man can buy a Polaroid, call the door and ask for permission to take a picture of the child, and you can also reject it.

Why should parents and children today have less privacy than their ancestors? Should spies, computer pirates, or even police officers must reach pictures of our children without permission? Of course not.

But what is at stake if the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union are in line with China and Russia’s attempts to weaken encryption technology. Recently, Apple has been news around the world to resist compliance with the request of the British government to access the special data stored in an encrypted manner on the company’s servers. An Instead of asking for information, governments want to be able to take them without giving citizens the opportunity to refuse.

If these initiatives flourish, governments will have unprecedented alert power. It is often said that it is necessary to fight the abuse of children, but there is little evidence that children will be safer if government agencies get unlimited access to their photos, conversations and site data. In fact, the opposite may happen, as journalists from Washington Post Jessica Conrara, Jane Abelson and John d. Hardin in investigating sexual assault on minors by American police officers.

To persuade public opinion that it is necessary to break the encryption, governments often resort to technical terms and stories, in order to present them as something only used by bad actors. For example, some legislators in the United States are trying to exploit parents’ concerns about enhancing policies that weaken the protection of children’s privacy.

It is clear that millions of parents who use every day use encrypted orders such as WhatsApp are not criminals. They only try to protect their privacy and privacy. But when someone is afraid, it is exposed to the message that the only solution is to allow the government to access their personal lives.

In order to be fair, some governments that today seek to weaken encryption technology are trying to solve real problems, such as spreading pornography for children, employing terrorists and default fraud. But it is important to understand how it is easy to encrypt (or not) these activities.

Researchers at the University of Barcelona contributed valuable ideas about the relationship between technology and social evils. As Paula Sibelia notes, techniques such as encryption are not essentially good or badly, but they are also far from being neutral. It arises in specific historical contexts and is determined by values, interests and rules of their time. These forces, in turn, affect the vision that people and themselves enjoy in society. To understand encryption, you must first understand the world you created.

But technologies are not just neutral tools that only evaluate the use that is presented. Mariana Moyano also indicates, it is possible to wear a shoe to demonstrate the nail or hit someone, but it was not designed for that. Behind every technology, there is a set of intentions (political and external). So that we must ask ourselves about the reason for creating a specific technology and what are the implicit interests in its design.

Finally, as Donna Harway argues, we must review our relationship with technology and plant new ways to communicate with the machines and systems that make up our lives. In essence, encryption is a tool that allows us to say “no” for those who want to clarify our data without our consent. It is also the basis of the Internet as a place where privacy is respected and there is an unlimited learning. Everyone should be considered an enabled to use tools that protect their privacy. There will be those who decide not to use it, but everyone must have the right to make this decision.

The British campaign against encryption is a serious threat against that basic freedom. RU’s residents already have less privacy tools than many other countries, as a result of the aggressive efforts of their government against encryption. If Apple or other great technology abandons government pressure, a dangerous global precedent will sit with consequences that can exceed 68 million people from RU.

When the authorities in Washington and London begin to resemble those of Beck and Moscow regarding privacy, it is time for dangerous thinking. But it is not too late to change the path. Those who appreciate the privacy on the Internet must hear ourselves, contact our actors and demand the protection of the encryption of attempts to weaken them, to preserve the freedoms that previous generations have taken from it.

*She was Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Internet Community Department in San Francisco

** Professor linked to the University of Barcelona, ​​he is the Faro Digital Director

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