{"id":1038,"date":"2008-01-16T09:21:21","date_gmt":"2008-01-16T16:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1038"},"modified":"2008-01-16T09:21:21","modified_gmt":"2008-01-16T16:21:21","slug":"is_encryption_a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1038","title":{"rendered":"Is encryption a right?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Law enforcement officials have long been wary of the spread of encryption technologies, fearing that they could provide an impenetrable cloak for criminal activity. For individuals, though, encryption offers perhaps the only means for keeping private information private in an age of digital communication. As the Washington Post reports<\/a> today, the encryption conflict is now coming to a head. A guy in Vermont, accused of storing child pornography on his computer, has refused to provide police with the password required to unlock the encrypted files on his hard drive. He claims that disclosing the password would violate his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. A judge backed his claim, and the government is now appealing that ruling in the federal courts.<\/p>\n

The outcome of the court battle could have broad implications. A former federal prosecutor makes the anti-encryption case: “If [the ruling] stands, it means that if you encrypt your documents, the government cannot force you to decrypt them … So you’re going to see drug dealers and pedophiles encrypting their documents, secure in the knowledge that the police can’t get at them.” But a privacy advocate sees the ruling as essential to protecting people from governmental snooping: “The last line of defense really is you holding your own password … That’s what’s at stake here.”<\/p>\n

Given the power that governments and other organizations now have to monitor communications, I would err on the side of protecting individual rights. But I can certainly see how encryption could be abused. The Post is correct in saying the case “raises a uniquely digital-age question about how to balance privacy and civil liberties against the government’s responsibility to protect the public.” It’s worth watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Law enforcement officials have long been wary of the spread of encryption technologies, fearing that they could provide an impenetrable cloak for criminal activity. For individuals, though, encryption offers perhaps the only means for keeping private information private in an age of digital communication. As the Washington Post reports today, the encryption conflict is now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}