I’ve written about Steven Levy before (1, 2, 3). I still consider his book, Hackers, the definitive history of the hacker culture. Now over at Backchannel Levy asks Why Are We Fighting the Crypto Wars Again?
Levy recounts the history of the first crypto war and notes that after it was won not much happened to improve security for the average user. Recently, however, a series of spectacular security lapses and the Snowden revelations of government snooping on Americans not accused or suspected of any crime have started to change things. People started demanding more security and several tech companies—particularly Apple—responded by baking in security and enabling it by default on their devices.
The government, which had been content to let things lie, suddenly started to panic. Claiming they had an absolute right to see any information if they got a warrant—and often even if they didn’t—they’ve started demanding that the tech companies change their products to allow this. All this came to a head with the San Bernardino case but more significantly with the WhatsApp issue that cryptographer Matthew Green says is the real point of the San Bernardino contretemps.
This is the real issue that phone decryption has been a proxy for: law enforcement access to messaging systems. pic.twitter.com/7ujoGbvD1l
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) March 12, 2016
Levy ends his article by glumly concluding that we’re back at square one.
UPDATE: a → at
UPDATE 2: The EFF has a nice explanation of the WhatsApp case that’s well worth reading. It explains the issues and why they matter.