WAR AGAINST PRIVACY

WAR AGAINST PRIVACY

  Do you like watching spy movies? You might have seen Jason Bourne, James bond series. In these movies we often see the computer operators hacking into different civilian mobile phones and surveillance cameras, to get the information they need to help their assets. Hacking into someone’s email accounts and reading their emails is just a piece of cake for them, but did it ever occur to you that all these things might be inspired by real life events?

     On June 5, 2013, The Guardian was the first one to publish a story, which revealed many of NSA’s (National security agency- intelligence agency of the United States) surveillance program secrets. Just 2 weeks after Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor had leaked the information,

President Obama defended the NSA surveillance programs during his visit to Berlin by saying: “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany. So lives have been saved.” Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, testified before Congress that: “the information gathered from these programs provided the U.S. government with critical leads to help prevent over 50 potential terrorist events in more than 20 countries around the world.” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said on the House floor in July that “54 times [the NSA programs] stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks both here and in Europe – saving real lives.”– (Ref- Article published in New America, Jan 13, 2014)

    This event shook the world, many NGO’s came forward for ‘right to privacy’. This is when the encryption got into more focus, ‘for the protection of privacy of millions of civilian’s. For those who do not know what the encryption is, in simple words ‘Encryption is the process of encoding a message or information in such a way that only authorized parties can access it and those who are not authorized cannot.’ In an encryption scheme, the intended information or message, referred to as plaintext, is encrypted using an encryption algorithm – a cipher- generating ciphertext that can only be read if decrypted. Emails were encrypted but still the privacy was not achieved, many still debate about whether the emails are safe enough, for any security agency might be reading your emails without you even knowing it.

    On April 5, 2016, WhatsApp announced that they had finished adding end-to-end encryption to ‘every form of communication’. End to end encryption is a system of communication where only the communicating users can read the messages. Means it prevents potential eavesdroppers- including telecom operators, internet providers and even the WhatsApp employees.

   On Aug 1, 2017, UK (United Kingdom) Home Secretary Amber Rudd writing in the telegraph said that real people don’t need the end-to-end encryption. She also added that end-to-end encryption is a problem, as officials can’t access the contents of messages sent via platforms using the mathematical methods. It is true enough that surveilling the emails, online messages might help the governments to protect the citizens, for it might give them insights of terrorist plans/ activities but it also mean that they can read the messages sent by non-criminal citizens. UK’s home secretary has asked for more availability of metadata- the who, what, how, and when – of encrypted messages from tech-companies. UK’s parliament is trying hard to fight against the E2E (end to end) encryption, for the protection of the country, to protect it against the threats unknown.

   Encryption is important because it allows you to securely protect data that you don’t want anyone else to have access to. Business use it to protect corporate secrets, individuals use it for sending private messages, but use of end-to-end encryption by the people, who wish to create chaos, do terrible things to the society, can’t be denied.

   What do you want? Which side are you on? Are you ready to sacrifice your privacy for the sake of greater good? Are you with government of UK against E2E encryption or with tech- companies, with E2E encryption? 

                        
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