Why appeasing governments over encryption will never work
David Cameron and the director of the FBI have both asked for 'backdoors' to be included in encryption softwareEver since the internet emerged into public view in the 1980s, a key question has been whether digital technology would pose an existential challenge to corporate and governmental power. In this context, I am what you might call a recovering utopian - "utopian" in that I once did believe that the technology would put it beyond the reach of state and corporate agencies; and "recovering" in the sense that my confidence in that early assessment has taken a hammering over the years. In that period, technology has sometimes trumped politics and/or commercial power, but at other times it's been the other way round.
The early battles were over intellectual property. Since computers are essentially copying machines, making perfect copies of digital goods became child's play. As a celebrated trope put it: "Copying is to digital technology as breathing is to animal life." So began the copyright wars, triggered by widespread piracy and illicit sharing of copyrighted files, which emasculated the music industry and led to the emergence of new corporate masters of the media universe - Apple, Spotify, YouTube and the rest - and the taming of the file-sharing monster. Result: Technology 1, Establishment 1.
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