On Bradley Young’s column about security and social media.

Posted by Ispeak4U: I always find it a strange position to insist that we keep our rules tightened so as to protect ourselves against our own government turning tyrannical.

Surely if you feel you can’t trust the Government to use any powers granted responsibly, you must also distrust them to the extent where you think they would go ahead and perform these same actions even without permission?

This privacy argument often strikes me to be much like the US obsession with possessing guns even though the primary reasons given for having them are clearly nonsense.

No matter how many guns you keep in your home you will not defend against either a foreign threat or your own armed forces in 2017.

Similarly, if GCHQ decides they want to read your private emails it seems that they could well go ahead and do that whether the general public gives their permission or not.

The argument to not grant the Government powers as they might misuse them, to me makes no sense.

Once you are at the point where you feel you can no longer trust your government it makes little difference whether you’ve granted them the powers or not!

So the discussion can then move on to whether they *need* these powers.

It’s not difficult to imagine circumstances where gaining access to encrypted information would be hugely beneficial to our national defences.

Sadly the current trend for homegrown terror means that it seems we need to be less concerned about defence against a foreign power and far more focused on identifying radicalised actors already in our midst.

For this type of work, surveillance of communications is an absolute cornerstone of tracking the movements and intentions of suspects. As for the question of whether service providers such as WhatsApp and Apple should provide security workarounds or bypasses to the security services?

As you say, any declaration of such actions would surely just encourage usage to ‘mutate and move on’.

Surely the correct action would be to provide the workarounds to the security services despite public denial, thus the Government gets the access they need and we’re all none the wiser!

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