Decrypting the Encryption Debate

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[Commentary] Following the horrible terrorist attacks in Paris, there have been renewed calls to impose restrictive government control over encryption by some analysts studying the attack. Their logic seems to be that such a large group of terrorists could not have planned the attacks over time without using some form of encryption to shield their activities from authorities, even though no actual evidence of encrypted communications has yet been found. I’m actually somewhat surprised encryption remains a controversial topic thousands of years after its creation.

The ability to encrypt and use cyphers to hide messages from unauthorized readers goes back at least as far as Roman times, when notes were written on leather strips wound around a pole of a certain diameter. To reassemble the message once the leather was unwound, the exact size pole needed to be employed on the other end. Over the years, hundreds of manual forms of encryption and an almost unlimited number of codes have been created to protect information. In fact, of the few ancient technologies still being used today, probably only encryption still carries such controversy. Whether we discover the terrorists in Paris used encryption, those horrible events have stirred the pot in the age-old encryption debate. The many good uses of encryption far outweigh the potential bad.

[John Breeden is the CEO of the Tech Writers Bureau]


Decrypting the Encryption Debate