My Thoughts on Encryption

We the people founded this country with citizen privacy a major principle

The OPM lost my security information. The State of South Carolina lost my income tax information. If the Government has the information it will be lost at some point. If the corporations have the information, it will be lost. In fact the citizens will also lose their information but will only lose their own, the other parties lose information of millions of uninvolved citizens. The reason the information will always be lost is because we are all human. We make mistakes. Just as we all have lost our car keys or house keys at some point in our lives, the keys to encryption will also be lost. Lets not let the Government be the one to lose it. Lets not force the corporations to be responsible for millions of peoples keys.

We don’t give a copy of our house keys to the police when we move into a new house, we should not give a copy of our encryption privacy keys to the police or government.

Law enforcement has a difficult job to do. Protecting 300 Million Americans from terrorists and other criminals is not easy. They have been doing a very good job. They must continue doing that job without jeopardizing the freedom and privacy of the law abiding citizens of this great country. We are a strong and resilient country, we should not let 100, 1000 or 10,000 terrorists take away our liberties. The security of the country should not be the most important consideration for everything we do. Our freedom, liberty and privacy should be the most important consideration.

In February 2016 Apple summarized the issue as follows: “While we believe the FBI’s intentions are good, it would be wrong for the government to force us to build a backdoor into our products. And ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect.”