Crypto wars reloaded? Privacy technologies, cybersecurity governance and government access to data

OII Professor Ian Brown explores cryptography policy on a panel discussion of ‘Crypto-Wars’ at the 2015 Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection conference. Brown explains that privacy-enhancing technologies such as encryption have been freely available for years, but their recent adoption by corporations with large user bases (including Apple, Facebook, and Google) has attracted reactionary responses from government agencies–these have a responsibility to implement cybersecurity governance and resilience frameworks that encryption impedes. Although Brown characterises this debate as an “ancient” one, he states that countries have now moved towards coordinating the adoption of encryption banning in the wake of the January 2015 Paris shootings, citing a leaked Council of the EU document written by the EU Counterterrorism expert.