Many thought provoking aspects to this essay, Reclaiming Sovereignty in the Digital Age, by Paris Marx.

You should just read its entirety. I wanted to dive into one topic, specifically. Early in his essay, he quotes a digital rights group:

Last month, the Global Digital Justice Forum, a group of civil society groups, published a letter about the ongoing negotiations over the United Nations’ Global Digital Compact. “It is eminently clear that the cyberlibertarian vision of yesteryears is at the root of the myriad problems confronting global digital governance today,” the group wrote. “Governments are needed in the digital space not only to tackle harm or abuse. They have a positive role to play in fulfilling a gamut of human rights for inclusive, equitable, and flourishing digital societies.”

Marx makes the argument that governments around the world are beginning to standup to tech industry with regulations. I agree that many are overdue. I think some may be unnecessary, in that you could simply apply existing laws to address some concerns, only in a different (digital) context. But there’s one place I think he’s thoroughly wrong.

The cyberlibertarian argument is that all communications must be encrypted to protect them from the governments they perceive as such a significant threat, and that means allowing the dregs of society to use them in criminal ways too; something the vast majority of the public would surely disagree with.

While I don’t think digital tools helping criminals is good, it is clear as day that encrypted communication must continue to be available. This is because fraud, phishing, and malware are rampant in our networked environment. Regular people should benefit from the protection that encryption provides from criminals. Will this lead to criminals also communicating via encrypted channels? Of course. Criminals conceal contraband in the voids of car bodies, we don’t outlaw car body work so police can see inside everyone’s car.

Since there is no backdoor only for “good guys” (and in his scenario, remember, Putin, Xi and Kim all count as “good guys”) we must live with the fact that police must use other tools at their disposal to break up criminal activity, as they have prior to the proliferation of public encryption.

We can’t make everyone less safe in order to make the police’s job a little bit easier. Furthermore, without encryption, we leave ourselves even more exposed to foreign disinformation campaigns, as hacking groups can more easily access our communications to allow their disinformation to appear more realistic and more targeted.

It appears the French police arrested Telegram founder on charges of enabling all sorts of illegal activities without breaking encryption because Telegram is not E2EE.

…authorities have long been able to get warrants to search people’s mail, wiretap their phones, or obtain their text messages. That’s the trade off we’ve collectively made, and one that the vast majority of people have never seen as a threat to their rights, freedoms, or liberty — because they’re not libertarians.

Technology is a step ahead, and there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. If we outlawed encryption, criminals would still have it because open source is a thing that has already distributed that capability to anyone willing to figure it out. Criminals have all the incentive they need to continue to support themselves if they cannot use encryption available daily to the general public. In addition bad actors in governments would use the security weaknesses to do what they have always done, legal or not, and that’s curtail the freedoms of the marginalized.

While war and crime are far from eliminated, we must recognize that we live in the safest time in all of humanity. Many more horrible things happened prior to publicly-available encryption. But conversely, the world being digitally interconnected, opens us up to newer classes of crime that in many respects are easier than they ever have been. We must take personal measures to reduce that risk.

Let’s use our legislative resources towards most of the rest of Marx’s points, especially the part about curtailing surveillance capitalism from following us all over the world. Meanwhile, let’s encrypt as much personal communication as we can.