With the internet and its countless facilities constantly finding its way into our lives, it is getting more and more important to realize what we can trust it for and where it does more harm than good. Today, most of us think twice before we say something on the internet or before we share sensitive information online. Eventually, as our world gets more integrated with the digital world, it’ll only make keeping information offline harder. Having strong encryption available to the public would make it safe and inspire confidence in the system of digitization. Additionally, I would like to expand on the parallel drawn between gloves and encryption by Ron Rivest. While it seems that the parallel drawn might be too far fetched and that a pair of gloves cannot be compared to encryption, we are slowly approaching towards a world where encryption might just be as essential as a glove or a shoe. Any item can technically be used with malicious intent but it is important to weigh the pros and cons of the range of its utility. Just because the government can control whether encryption can be made ubiquitous should not change the utility or the need we have for it in our lives.
Tag: Singh chapter 7
The debate over privacy and government surveillance seems to present opposite ends of the spectrum. The government does not necessarily need to have “wide latitude” but it still needs some latitude to use surveillance for the benefit of our nation’s security. Completely preventing the government from being able to monitor suspicious activity would be detrimental to our society. Singh talks about the drug dealers, organized crime, terrorists, and pedophiles as the “Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse,” (Singh 305) and how they would most benefit from stronger encryption. Government involvement would allow the possibility of these criminals being stopped. The counterargument is that our privacy is more important, but that argument does not look at the full picture. For example, if there was a terrorist group plotting to attack a city and the government had no power to monitor online activity and thus unable to prevent the attack, we would have essentially sacrificed innocent people’s lives for the protection of our privacy. That is not a fair trade.
Photo credit: “Padlock” by wayne wayne via Flickr CC.
Perhaps it is our individualistic society that fosters this attitude, but privacy should not be prized over people’s lives. Besides, there is value to government use of electronic surveillance. With the number of people that have access to the internet, we have created a sort of virtual society, and as is evident with any society in the real world, crime is bound to exist. A little bit of monitoring could definitely benefit us. If the government is allowed to use electronic surveillance to a certain extent or within specific restrictions, then our privacy would still be protected and the government would still be able to provide national security.
