Weakening security will not advance security

25th November 2015

Joe Bush

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The wake of the recent terror attacks in Paris has left many of us apprehensive and anxious, and has raised concerns over our personal and national security. And, with technology playing an increasingly integral role in international terrorism, many MPs in the UK have called for a weakening in encryption technology in an effort to assist our police and security forces.

To increase the protection of data, technology companies are increasingly employing data scrambling systems to its hardware services, but many politicians have called for these encryption services to be weakened so that intelligence services can thwart potential terror attacks more easily.

This ‘weakening’ could potentially include ‘backdoors’ being added to the encryption software that would allow law enforcement access to data that would be otherwise locked away.

However, the Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC), a policy body that represents tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Samsung, and communicates the views of its members to the government and legislative bodies, has warned against this proposed move.

Although intended to increase our national security, the ITIC claim that a weakening of encryption technology would only make us more vulnerable and serve as an opportunity for terror groups. A statement from ITIC’s President and CEO Dean Garfield stated that, “Weakening security with the aim of advancing security simply does not make sense.”

Indeed, back in June, leading associations representing the technology industry in the US wrote a letter to President Barack Obama opposing ‘any policy actions or measures’ by the federal government that would undermine encryption technologies. The letter stressed that such policies would be impractical and warned against incorporating ‘work-arounds’ into technology products and services, in order for government agencies to access information.