Two weeks ago criminal prosecutors in the USA made a proposition in the US-senate to ban good encryption in the internet. Obviously the NSA surveillance state is taking the next step to oppress free speech and basic right.
Justice minister Sally Quillian Yates and head of the FBI, James B. Comey, want that companies like Google and Apple are forced to use an encryption which courts of law are able to decrypt. New York’s district attourney Cyrus Vance goes one step further and demands that the US-parlament should be allowed to dictate which cell phones are allowed to be manufactured.
In 2013 a group of experts of the White House suggested the opposite, that the USA should support the use of good encryption. But on that day most of the senators of the committee already left the room before the voting started. But when Yates and Comey took their speeches two weeks ago the room was still full. Both of them insisted that IT companies should only offer services that the companies can read themselves.
The problem is that when the companies are able to read all the communications of their users, it is also way easier for outsiders to hack the information. And of course the governments would be able to collect even more information of their citizens than they’re doing now. The right to privacy is once again violated by the government of the USA. The internet is supposed to be a sphere of free speech but it is more and more becoming a tool of governments to watch and control their citizens.