White House · Canada · Wired
Encryption Is Getting Squeezed From All Sides
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Welcome to Kernel Panic, a weekly newsletter by Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess from inside the new world of privacy and digital security.
Key facts
- Welcome to Kernel Panic, a weekly newsletter by Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess from inside the new world of privacy and digital security
- The Great White North is the latest country to contemplate legislation that could mandate backdoors and increase data retention in encrypted services
- In recent years, the UK and Australia have introduced sweeping surveillance reforms that can compel companies to break their encryption
- Other encryption-threatening proposals have also emerged in the EU, France, India, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and others
Summary
The Great White North is the latest country to contemplate legislation that could mandate backdoors and increase data retention in encrypted services. Encrypted messaging app Signal has said it would exit the Canadian market because the legislation would require unacceptable changes to its open source projects. It’s been maddening and disturbing to see more and more democratic countries around the world propose changes to their surveillance and data collection laws, with the aim of giving cops and intelligence agencies greater powers to access people’s information. “There have always been some officials within certain agencies that tend to view technology as a crime scene in and of itself, and it becomes a myopic point of fixation where access is desired,” says Kate Robertson, a senior research associate at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.