"Online shopping, banking and messaging all use encryption. Cameron either knows his anti-terror talk is unworkable and is looking for headlines, or he hasn’t got a clue. (...) On Monday David Cameron managed a rare political treble: he proposed a policy that is draconian, stupid and economically destructive. The prime minister made comments widely interpreted as proposing a ban on end-to-end encryption in messages – the technology that protects online communications, shopping, banking, personal data and more. (...) It would spell the end of e-commerce, private online communications and any hope of the UK having any cybersecurity whatsoever." "David Cameron doesn't understand technology very well, so he doesn't actually know what he's asking for. For David Cameron's proposal to work, he will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of his jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. (...) Cameron is not alone here. The regime he proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates." - Amira

"This, then, is what David Cameron is proposing: * All Britons' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept * Any firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software * All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked * Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software * Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services * All packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped * Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software * Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave * Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons" http://boingboing.net/2015... - Amira

“It reminds me of that quote from Benjamin Franklin: ‘Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.’” http://www.theguardian.com/technol... - Amira