Obama On Cryptocurrency

President Barack Obama commenting on unbreakable encryption available for citizens. This was, I think, in connection with the dispute between Apple and the federal government on providing users with encryption without a back door in 2016.

My comment on the issue is that secret communication is nothing new. People have always been able to talk to each other out of anybody else's earshot or use some sort of coded language in communication potentially being listened in on by third parties. Cockney rhyming slang comes to mind as an example.

What is new is surveillance, mass surveillance in particular. The UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are not allowed intercept the private communications of their own citizens without a court order but what they do is circumvent their laws by spying on each other's citizens. Last year, I discussed privacy with a couple of friends of mine and they said that they'd prefer a society of total non-privacy as it would "level the playing field" and that maintaining privacy was a lost cause anyway. I completely disagree on both counts. First of all, fine tuning levels of privacy and security as well as sharing different levels of meta knowledge can be achieved using cryptography. Also, there are very good reasons to restrict the powers of the government as modern states are millions of times stronger than individual citizens. Even in a case where wrongdoings by the government were out in the open, the government can and sometimes does simply go on committing them despite all protests as it is immensely more powerful than any other actors.