[Meredith Whittaker in the Financial Times]

A great op-ed from Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal on the ludicrous demands by the British government for Apple to backdoor its encryption:

"Imagine a government telling a car company to secretly weaken the effectiveness of the brakes on all the cars it sells, recklessly endangering the safety of millions. It would be an unthinkable undermining of public safety. 

Sadly, this is what’s happening in the UK in cyber security, where Apple was forced to strip the vital privacy and security protection of end-to-end encryption from its backups storage service — exposing people and infrastructure to significant vulnerabilities."

Meredith is (as usual) right. She points out that not only is this a wildly dangerous thing to do in general, but it undermines the technology industry that the British government sometimes says it wants to support.

Americans shouldn't be complacent. This may be a battle that's heading our way next - and one that was already fought in the nineties. We can't let these erosions of civil liberties take place here; they should not happen anywhere.

#Technology

[Link]