Davos: “Encryption is fundamental to running a good and safe internet that can be trusted,” said Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. “Governments need to support security standards, not wreck them”.
Wales was speaking at a WIS@key lunch in Davos and was referring to a recent speech by British Prime Minister David Cameron in which he spoke of the need to ban internet encryption.
Wales dismissed Cameron’s idea as both flatly impossible and also dangerous from a philosophic point of view because encryption is vital to create the essential trust in the security of the system that any internet user needs.
Wales pointed out that recent terror attacks like in Paris did not use encrypted communication.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, at Davos. GN Photo / Francis Matthew
“They sent SMSs to each other and others have used gmail and cell phone they fling away. Stopping encryption will not stop terror and it will do untold damage,” he said.
The requirement to combat terrorists on the internet as anywhere else was the heart of the comments from Robert McFarlane, a former National Security Advisor to US President Ronald Regan, who was responsible for designing the missile shield system nicknamed Star Wars that helped bring the Soviet Union the negotiating table.
Dangers
He spoke of the current dangers of asymmetric warfare by which terrorists can attack critical infrastructure of a country, close down all power and water for two to three months, and stop mass transit systems.
“What was an issue of privacy has now become an issue of protecting infrastructure in this renewed war. We need to be more clear on what are the limits for both civil rights and security,” said McFarlane, who added that he has been involved in trying to get legislation through the House and the Senate to require power stations to observe certain minimum internet and communication protocols -- but the two bills have been stuck for more than six years over such civil liberty concerns.
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The group tended to the argument that block chains are the solution to the apparently impossible conundrum of offering security of transaction and privacy while also fighting terror and crime.
The panel agreed that one key is that "block chains" use open standards so cannot be limited and their hosting on endless series of computers as the chains of transactions grow makes them unhackable.
Block chains are a continuously growing series of transactions stored on a permissionless and distributed database of transactional data records which cannot be tampered with, even by the operators of the data.
The panel were also well aware that the internet of Things means profound change as more than 50 billion items get an internet identity.
As Moreira of WIS@key said, “When this number of items start to communicate with each other we will not be able to manage it, so we will have to install intelligent tags on the items and the communications will become automatic. As your car arrives in the garage, the door will open and the coffee will start boiling, without intervention.”
