Back in March I gave an invited talk to the Cambridge University Ethics in Mathematics Society on the Crypto Wars. They have just put the video online here. We spent much of the 1990s pushing back against attempts by the intelligence agencies to seize control of cryptography. From the Clipper Chip through the regulation of … Continue reading History of the Crypto Wars in Britain
Today we unveil a major report on whether law enforcement and intelligence agencies should have exceptional access to cryptographic keys and to our computer and communications data generally. David Cameron has called for this, as have US law enforcement leaders such as FBI Director James Comey. This policy repeats a mistake of the 1990s. The … Continue reading Crypto Wars 2.0
The Telegraph and Guardian reported yesterday that the government plans to install deep packet inspection kit at ISPs, a move considered and then apparently rejected by the previous government (our Database State report last year found their Interception Modernisation Programme to be almost certainly illegal). An article in the New York Times on comparable FBI/NSA … Continue reading Resumption of the crypto wars?
Yesterday I took part in a panel discussion organised by the Adam Smith Institute on the Online Safety Bill. This sprawling legislative monster has outlasted not just six Secretaries of State for Culture, Media and Sport, but two Prime Ministers. It’s due to slither back to Parliament in November, so we wrote a Policy Brief … Continue reading The Online Safety Bill: Reboot it, or Shoot it?
John Brockman of Edge interviewed me in London in March. The video of the interview, and a transcript, are now available on the Edge website. Edge runs big interviews with several dozen scientists a year, with particular interest in people who do cross-disciplinary work. For me, the interaction of economics, psychology and engineering is one … Continue reading Video on Edge
This morning at 0930 the Joint Committee on the IP Bill is launching its report. As one of the witnesses who appeared before it, I got an embargoed copy yesterday. The report s deeply disappointing; even that of the Intelligence and Security Committee (whom we tended to dismiss as government catspaws) is more vigorous. The … Continue reading Report on the IP Bill
We’re steadily learning more about the latest Trusted Computing proposals. People have started to grok that building signed boot into UEFI will extend Microsoft’s power over the markets for AV software and other security tools that install around boot time; while ‘Metro’ style apps (i.e. web/tablet/html5 style stuff) could be limited to distribution via the … Continue reading Trusted Computing 2.1