Cybersecurity

Encryption and surveillance: The unstoppable force and the immovable object of the internet age

The US government has decided not - at least for now - to seek new laws to force tech companies to decode their customers' encrypted communications.
Over the last year there has been an gradually intensifying debate about what to do about the growth of end-to-end encrypted communications: because of the way these systems are designed, these messages are all-but-impossible to spy on.
Intelligence agencies and police have a warned about the problem of 'going dark', that criminals and terrorists are using these systems to plot in uncrackable secrecy. This has led to calls for legislation to force the companies that offer such services to hand over customers' messages unencrypted when required by law enforcement. Privacy campaigners on the other hand argued that any such move would undermine the security of the internet and extend already-excessive state-sponsored snooping even further.