Voice of the Masses: How can we educate politicians?
UK Prime Minister David Cameron has suggested that end-to-end encryption, which prevents the government from snooping on communication, should be banned. He asks: “In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?”
To many of us in the Free Software world, and everywhere else, this is a terrifying remark and a full-on assault on civil liberties. We believe in the right to private communication, and if the government is allowed to spy on everyone all the time, this could have a huge impact on e-commerce and the digital economy as a whole.
So for our first podcast of the year, tell us what you think: how can we educate our politicians about the importance of privacy on the internet? Should all PPE degrees include a module on how the internet works? Or do we need a completely new party that includes prospective MPs who actually understand the net, and how encryption is vital to its future?
Let us know your comments below, and we’ll read out the best!
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About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
dispel the if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear myth would be #1 on my todo list.
I’ve forgotten who it was, but the best response I’ve heard to this is “How much do you earn per annum?” The nothing-to-hide brigade tend to balk a little at that one.
Why not vote for an educated person for a change ? Educating those in charge is hopeless I’m afraid…
I think it is a very sensitive subject. On one hand we want complete privacy, and on the other we want the threats to be stopped. I disagree with the news article that script kiddie would be able to access or nothing would be secure etc. That doesn’t have to be the case. Maybe authorities should be the certificate issuer with the owner of second private key. That way it will still be secure and only authorities would be able to access it when needed and many would have no problem with that. It is a bit like CCTV is everywhere and only used when necessary by authorities. Script kiddies cannot access to CCTV data, it is locked in their video rooms that they have a key to.
That’s putting a LOT of trust in the authorities to do nothing wrong though. What happens when they leave a laptop full of private keys on a train? (Similar things have happened in the past.) Or if someone in govt goes against the “rules” and decides to snoop on you? (Again, there are many precedents for this.) History is chock-full of governments utterly abusing their positions of authority, and there’s nothing to suggest it’d be any different here.
Decrypt Cameron’s private communications and publish them.
Mandatory labotomies, for anyone in power, who suggests outlawing encryption.
It’s the only way.
I don’t blame Cameron really, this is expected behaviour.
However I do blame whoever is supposed to be advising him on all things technology. Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows banning encryption like this is not practical.
You’ve got it the wrong way around. I’m sure that there are all sorts of people in the tech industry screaming at Cameron that this is a bad idea, but historically our governments have a very poor track record of listening to experts.
I don’t think education comes into it much. Politicians (Cameron’s ilk in particular) will use unfortunate world events to push through with their agenda in blissful ignorance of the ramifications on the lives of us normal folk.
Its possible that a more tech-savvy generation of politicians wouldn’t be willing to so readily expose their tech ignorance as to suggest doing away with encryption. Ultimately, however, they will do what serves the government’s interest first.
Most of the current crop of politicians are pretty clueless on just about everything because they have very limited experience outside the Westminster bubble, indeed they don’t even know which legislation covers which subject, one twit thinks that refugee status is governed by the ECHR and the Human Rights Act.
They really have no idea what encryption does and why it is necessary, so they feel threatened by the very concept; the spooks on the other hand know full well what they want and will pester dimwit politicians to do their bidding.
Of course the corollary of Cameron’s idea is that the bad guys will be able to crack into the nuclear industry and banking system or the NHS computer systems just for laughs.
I think most of them should be sectioned under the Mental Health Act!
A politician cannot be expected to understand all the issues that they need to deal with. But they should, must, be able to get good advice, and announce that. I am sure that Cameron was given good advice my his civil servants and chose to ignore that. I am also sure that various people of influence have advised him to the contrary that it is possible to decrypt all communications because they have vested interests in increasing surveillance powers. The problem is that he is unduly influenced by the power lobbies rather than the experts.
What we really need is that all laws and government initiatives should be double blind tested, to test whether they are actually effective. This way these sorts of stupid laws will be quickly dismissed, and only laws with proven effectiveness will prevail.
In the case of the incidents in Paris, information was not the problem, the individuals where known to authorities and had been watched.
There are two thinks that work, a fair application of the law, and political discussions with disengaged groups in our society. We should be talking to Muslim groups an countries and removing the and real injustices that exist.
The Linux Voice party. Sounds quite good no?
“Should all PPE degrees include a module on how the internet works?”
Presumably a facetious question, but it does point to how problematic uniformity in politics is. As it becomes professionalised, the political class become more detached from the rest of society in every area. But saying that politicians should have knowledge of a particular area, as many sectors of society do (including technology), just feeds that uniformity. In fact it contributes to the minority capture of politics. Far more effective is ensuring politics actually reflects a diversity of knowledge.
educating David Cameron?! hahahahaha!
O boy, where do we start?
Our politicians, though they may not be the most technologically informed of people, they are not short of people to call on who are, but for some reason they seem to take every opportunity to make decisions that supports their already existing political philosophy and dogma … or just be seen to be doing something that the electorate can understand, i.e. assault our civil liberties in the name of security.
Unfortunately, the general public seem to be as clueless as our politicians when it comes to these things, and as with the Snowdon revelations, are greeted with a great sigh of indifference. The education of the public is as much needed as for our politicians. The saying goes we only get the politicians we deserve, but that’s another discussion.
There have been attempts to address this. Mark Henderson’s The Geek Manifesto: Why Science Matters, promotes a more scientific approach to creating policy and points out that our scientific illiteracy is hindering our economic recovery. It also successfully crowd-funded its distribution to every MP in Parliament – fat lot of good it did, but at least they have no excuse for ignorance.
Glyn Moody makes some good points in his recent blog on the subject (http://bit.ly/1AcylLl), not least of which is that the security services knew about the Paris gunmen. Incidentally, our security services know about the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby. The point being that the information the security services already collect is identifying terrorists, doing something about it is the problem. He also has a nice quote from an FBI whistleblower, “If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, how does it help to add hay?”
I’m a little bit embarrassed that our security services have not been able to insert backdoors into the encryption protocols/chips like the NSA have. We expect more.
I agree with something Jon said in a podcast long gone; I’ve never heard a compelling generalised argument *for* personal privacy.
There are certainly specific instances where we should have access to privacy and the ability to keep certain information private from certain bodies. But I do not buy the prevailing notion that privacy is good *in the abstract*.
Richard Stallman famously campaigned *against* personal privacy when he encouraged users on a multi-user system to use blank passwords. From an RMS speech in 1986 (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html) :
“Because I don’t believe that it’s really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn’t be willing to help uphold the security regime. On the systems that permit it I use the “empty password”, and on systems where that isn’t allowed, or where that means you can’t log in at all from other places, things like that, I use my login name as my password. It’s about as obvious as you can get. And when people point out that this way people might be able to log in as me, i say “yes that’s the idea, somebody might have a need to get some data from this machine. I want to make sure that they aren’t screwed by security”.”
I agree with that, I think *as an ideal* we (individual people) should aim towards as much openness with each other as is possible. And I’m not sure how this reconciles with the obvious need to prevent governments and corporations from accessing personal information with which they cannot be trusted.
Many governments, including our own, have proven themselves utterly incompetent at understanding and legislating these issues. They are complex issues and they simply do not possess the necessary knowledge (and of course are lobbied by interested, wealthy parties).
To mangle a Wittgenstein quote:
Whereof one does not understand, thereof one should not legislate.
To answer the actual question, I don’t think we should try to educate them as it is pissing in the wind. I think we should (as we tend to anyway) disobey stupid laws en masse.
I would vote for them! MikeOS could be integrated into the national curriculum, and made the default OS. Anybody running a different operating system would have to be investigated by Richard Stallman.
We need to elect more engineeers and scientists, people that are familiar with technology, but more importantly are used to basing their theories on observaatiion and thnking through the consequences of their decisions.
In my opnion, to think that such remarks are due to a lack of understanding of either the technology, it being necessary for the possibility of private exchange of thoughts, feelings and ideas or the importance of all this for a democract even remotely resembling its own ideal is far too optimistic.
While Cameron won’t likely have a clue what gpg is, he most certainly thinks that any privacy (secrecy) amongst citizens is undermining the power of ruling elites – and he is right with that. That, especially in the UK, this is obviously not far enough outside of the political mainstream to be clearly seen and marked as a totalitarian fantasty, is neither a technological nor educational, but a poltical issue.
In a working democracy there would be effective repellents against this. If the UK – or, for that matter, any other of the western ‘democracies (TM)’ provides these in form of ballots listing viable alternatives or effective forums of assertion I don’t know, but strongly doubt.
I think that it’s too late for education. The UK democratic system is broken and I believe that it is long past time that we follow the example of Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre and bring out the Guillotines.
The select committee process does give experts a voice. LINX (London Internet Exchange) which is a membership based peering group where most of the UK ‘s internet traffic is exchanged has a public affairs officer who regularly appears in front of select committees and speaks to politicians. As LINX is a technical organisation it’s voting members are the main technical staff of most the UK’s ISPs. Thus the public affairs officer speaks with a certain weight behind him. The position the public affairs officer puts forward is that of the technical IP staff not management.
With regards to Mr Cameron’s recent outburst the public affairs office will as ever put the technical case for why this is a bad idea. Some of the most vocal LINX members have also already taken to YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G8dPAdmyss
Look, I /know/ this will sound redundant, but the truth is you have to actually engage with your local politicians, discover whether they are or are not an idiot, and if they are, discover who is supporting them to make decisions in your name, that’s really all there is to it, oh, as well as kind of get behind the kind of politicians you actually want to represent you. But yeah, that’s really all there is to it. Or you might like to run yourself. thats another option. Or buy someone you like. But really that is actually all there is to it.