Civics is boring, so, let's encrypt something (2024)

Summary

December 2, 2024Volume 22, issue 5 PDF Civics is Boring. So, Let's Encrypt Something! IT professionals can either passively suffer political solutions or participate in the process to achieve something better. Poul-Henning Kamp It's a common trope in entertainment for some character to deliver a nonlinear response to something seemingly trivial, only for that to later prove to have been a vitally important clue. So, that room the janitor won't let anybody into? Right, that isn't actually a storage closet, but instead it's the Portal to Hell. Governments have a quirk like that in the sense that you can get away with a lot of crap—in particular, if it looks like it might benefit the economy—But Nobody Messes with Fundamental Human Rights, OK? As I write this, the founder of the encrypted communication service Telegram is under arrest in France. And, depending on where you get your news, he's either a freedom fighter subject to political persecution or a criminal mastermind getting his due. He probably is a bit of both, but he's under arrest now because he messed with the Fundamental Human Rights of people in France. I'll spare you a long civics lesson, but I will provide two important clues to figure out what is going on with politicians and encryption right now. First, when legislators write laws to protect human rights, they decide who has to take responsibility for the problem, and what happens if they fail to lift the burden. So, if you're present when somebody falls off a ladder, the law has made it your problem to try to save that person's life. If you witness a crime, the law has made it your problem to tell the truth about what you saw in court. Similarly, if you publish something that somebody else wrote, the law makes you responsible for ensuring it doesn't endanger national security. Second clue: Judges are superusers. To perform their job, which is to correct wrongs, judges are empowered to write court orders that sanction otherwise illegal violations of h...