We live in an unsafe world. With multiple terrorist attacks and mass killings all around the world we live in has more dangers than any time in our history. The problem at the center of our problems are all revolving around encryption, or the lack of it to be more specific. Encryption is a process that scrambles your data based on a certain key to protect your data while it is transferred from one place to another be it on your computer hard drive or even across the internet. This is an added layer of security for those of us who; frequent social media, shop online, use public Wi-Fi or the internet in general. Encryption has recently become a very hot topic in the news but has been argued over for centuries. One of the most recognizable examples of encryption are the secret message puzzles from the back of cereal boxes. The ones where you would hold up a red film and were able to read the words because it blocked out all the red letters and reviled only the non-red ones. In recent years sites like Amazon and EBay use encryption to secure your checkout data as you pay for your orders. However this does not mean that your data is secure from your house to their servers only that it is secure while they are processing it. This type of standardized encryption is also very well-known with many hacker groups able to attack a server and get at the data, then decrypt it. We should all be using encryption every day because, it secures or online data traffic and makes us less susceptible to cyber-attacks, decreases the negative effects of government mass data hoarding and assist in keeping our ideas and personal information safe, even on public access points.

In the modern age, everyone is able to use the internet. The internet traffic around the world has exponentially grown throughout the past decade with the introduction, and mass adoption, of smart phones. We are under attack twenty-four seven while using our electronic devices. The large amount of electronic devices we own as well as the more time we spend using them rather than taking care of what we use then for. When is the last time we cleaned out ours computer like we should every so often? Or reinstalled our operating systems to help alieve a swamped registry that was causing our computers to slow down? Many of us probably just toss the device and got the next, new, device and completely disregarded the last device. We have probably just thrown the device away without properly destroying the data. This is harmful for many obvious environmental reasons but also poses a security threat to all of us who do this. The data on your hard drive is very easy to recover and use off these old devices. Many websites save cookies of websites we frequently visit and that is how they save password and login information so it can automatically log us in to whatever website we frequently visit. This data is stored on our hard drives and is visible to anyone who knows where to look. The problem that most of us have is that we still use mechanical storage on our home computers. This means that data is magnetically stored on a hard drive and is then read similarly to a record. The issue arises when we "wipe" our hard drives because most of the plates that the drive uses are still magnetized and can be read with special tools and technologies that hackers commonly use. However hackers are not our only threat in this cyber outback. The governments of the world have recently started to use a form of mass surveillance to start having an excuse to open up, look at and save any and all traffic that goes through the web. To many this does not seem like a problem but the more power we give to the government the more they are likely to abuse it. We can be honest the government does not need to see our summer beach pictures or how badly we got smashed last night. None of these types of data collections have proven to be of any use to the government in any investigation. Yet they just keep soaking it up because we let them. 

This background information helps to point to the more dangerous topic here of encryption. The white elephant in the room of the consumer computing world. The evil weapon of terrorist and pedophiles. The ultimate statement of "I have something to hide." Or at least that what we are lead to believe. The truth is that there is nothing wrong with encrypting your data, the government do it themselves. If anything we should be motivated to encrypt our storage drives and switch over to solid state storage. The issue that arises is what the government wants the encryption in the private sector to become. For lack of a better term they want it to become a similar surface finish to swiss cheese. The way they plan to accomplish this is with something called a backdoor into encryption. This works similarly to leaving a key to your front door under your mat. While it might let who you want in, they are not the only ones who can find it and use it. This would be hackers and identity thieves that are prevalent today. The only difference if that now instead of trying to pick the lock to our metaphorical house they are able to walk right in and take what they want and we might not even know. This is clearly an issue to our security and needs to be addressed with a discussion on when it is acceptable to use a backdoor to encryption and if could even be successfully done. 

In order to maintain a stable encryption backdoor the door would need to be constantly be moving and everyone would have to re-encrypt their data on the fly. This requires an immense amount of compute power that many of us simply do not have. An editorial from encryption expert Christian Dawson states "Let's say tech can be built to facilitate operationalizing backdoors. It's going to be new tech. Most of the Internet runs on legacy tech. Who covers the costs of upgrade?" I agree with his statement here about the massive undertaking it would be to try and bring the whole current and expanding net to the updated standard when most are using legacy tech, not even on par with today's standards. He later goes on to say "Even if you can technically make a backdoor-laden system work, it will always be less secure than one without one. How will the business liability insurance respond to the increased risk to critical consumer data?" (Dawson) This is another very valid point made by Dawson. If we are forced to have encryption who takes responsibility if something is stolen? Is it the service that got breached? Or the authority that enforced the laws? This is critical from an insurance perspective and might make personal data insurance near impossible. However, Dawson is not the only person who is in the same camp. Presidential candidate, for the libertarian party, and internet security activist John MacAfee is quoted saying " ... if the government succeeds in getting this back door, it will eventually get a back door into all encryption, and our world, as we know it, is over." MacAfee is the creator of the antivirus software that shares the name. He has been an activist for internet security for years and decided to try to run in the 2016 United States presidential race. There are many other experts who all share similar ideas to these two. Like Eugene Spafford of the Association of Computer Machinery who says "Many computing professionals have a different set of views, and stress that restrictions to weaken encryption will be much more harmful than helpful." This gives a quantitative measure to the widespread concern of this issue throughout all aspects of the computing field.

The battle for encryption has recently hit mainstream media in the infamous battle of the Federal Bureau of Investigation versus Apple Computers. In this legal battle the FBI had recovered a phone from the scene of the tragic San Bernardino shooting that took the lives of many. They then wanted Apple to create a piece of software that could allow unlimited trials at the passcode that locks the phone. They could not access the encrypted data that could hold information of any connections in the states linked to terrorism. This kind of shady tactic to acquire a backdoor was quickly spotted and shot down by leaders in the tech community. Tech sites like theguardian were quoted as saying " ...  the FBI is requesting as a "backdoor", situating the request squarely in the middle of the broader debate about whether the government can make tech companies provide access to customer data."(McGregor). It is good to see that tech companies are taking an affirmative stand on the backdoor battle to stop the government from taking advantage of the consumer.

Many other governing bodies have tied to go further than just a phone backdoor. Some have tried to ban encryption entirely. David Cameron, the prime minister of the United Kingdom tried to completely remove encryption for all types of consumer markets. This created a major problem for many online markets. In a similar fashion to all the other times it has been contested. Experts like those at the Research Repository have come forward with such arguments like "Encryption is a core part of the internet; it's use is increasing every day  --  Google's services, including search and email, use encrypted streams, as do Facebook and Twitter and many other widely used sites." (Buchanan)  He makes a very valid point as many major websites use encryption to help protect their patron's data. Amazon decided that it could not operate at all under the new encryption regulations, if they were passed. This should be a red flag for any citizen who cares about their personal security. It is insane that the United Kingdom's government would jeopardize the security of their citizens to make their jobs easier. Lead professors at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, have defended encryption saying "Privacy-enhancing technologies need to be protected as a crucial and growing part of the digital economy  ... " (Boiten). Some governing bodies like the GCHQ and the NSA have tried to force backdoors or even pay private companies to put backdoors in their encryption standards. An example of this is when the NSA paid RSA billions of dollars to implement a backdoor into their software that shares the name.  Meanwhile across the pond, The GCHQ was called out for implementing a back door into the MIKEY-SAKKE voice over internet protocol. This standard is used to ease-drop on land-line and cellphone calls.  

Although the reasons for encryption are very apparent there are still those who believe that encryption is only a bad thing that is used only by bad people. Some people have studied the subject and have concluded that encryption hinders government investigations on the fact that they cannot access curtail parts of information in time critical events. They also go on to say that if they mass collect data they do not inconvenience their citizens with trivial data request. They mostly rely on internet service providers or ISPs. They try to get the ISPs to hand over massive amounts of unencrypted internet traffic so that they can hold on to it and possibly us it later. This allows them to have any information they could need for an investigation on tap.

What can we do? As people who live in the digital age there are many defense we can take against the numerous cyber-attacks on all fronts. One of the greatest weapons is our ability to vote for the right officials. We need people who understand that internet is not just for porno and cat videos. The internet has become one of the great wonders of the world but also the largest battle grounds and crime ridden alleyways. An easy thing to do is get a virtual private network or VPN. This is a client that runs on your devices and uses high level encryption to encrypt data up streams and downloads. An important part of protecting ourselves is t keep our communication between the two sources and not to invite the whole of the internet into you perusing of cat gifs and grandmas Facebook. Many are worried how hiding your internet traffic leads to pirating and other types of illegal media consumption. This gives the user some protection against man in the middle attacks that are attacks that intercept the user's stream on its way to the ISPs. We can also start encrypting our storage drives to protect our personal data off of stolen computers or discarded ones. The final thing we can do is use solid state drives as opposed to mechanical drives. This removes the possibility of "ghost data" or data left over from a formatted hard drive that can be recovered. As seen, the threat of encryption backdoors is real and should be addressed for the safety of all of us. 

