Snippet: What We’re Not Saying by Supporting Encryption ☇

Matt Birchler:

I feel like my entire teenage and adult life has had an undertone of people trying to scare me into giving up any semblance of privacy.

I was in high school on 9/11 and remember The Patriot Act was instituted with near unanimous support just a month after that tragic day, and patriotism was used as the justification for mass surveillance (see the Enhanced Surveillance Procedures part of the law, specifically). It was “patriotic” to support this sort of thing, and I remember as a then-registered-Republican thinking, “I have nothing to hide, so I’m not worried about this.” Older me has changed a lot from that kid…

Normally, I won’t quote this much of a post, but Birchler’s comments need to be included in full (and they’re only a few sentences, go through the link to check out the source article). I’ve heard the nothing-to-hide argument time and time again, and while I’m not up to anything illegal, I still don’t want anyone to have the ability to just go through my stuff on a whim—there’s too many ways this could easily be abused outside of legal warrant/search processes (even if it never left Apple). Too many times, the argument against encryption or for some sort of magical, only-the-good-guys-can-use-it backdoor comes up after a mass shooting. The people arguing for these kinds of things clearly have no idea how technology works and the Pandora’s Box that could open.