I am proud of this opinion piece I wrote for the MIT Technology Review, back during the height of the Apple v. FBI legal battle over encryption and forced backdoors. While I am clearly a fan of strong encryption, I am also grounded with regards to the limits of what it can achieve. Ultimately, my point was to call out some of the ways in which encryption of message content still leaves us vulnerable to surveillance by adversaries of all kinds, whether legal or not.
A View from Nathan Freitas 6 Ways Law Enforcement Can Track Terrorists in an Encrypted World
Government officials want us to believe that encryption is helping terrorists, but law enforcement still has plenty of tools to get the data. November 24, 2015
The phrase “the terrorists are going dark” has come back in vogue after the Paris attacks, referring to assertions that encryption is somehow enabling the communication of future attackers to go undetected. But the public is being presented with a false choice: either we allow law enforcement unfettered access to digital communications, or we let the terrorists win. As always, it is not that simple.
Read the full article here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/543896/6-ways-law-enforcement-can-track-terrorists-in-an-encrypted-world/
(I was also very honored to get my very own illustrated avatar… )