https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/23/us-iran-israel-war-western-leaders-diplomacy

You might be the baddies, even without a skull on your clothing.

Ask the question every day and make sure it is not true.

I felt inspired to write them an email. Here it is:

Please don’t weaken encryption and so endanger us in the name of making us safer. Anyone can access backdoors into encrypted software. Not just the “good guys.”

Here is an analogy to show what I mean:

Encryption Housing Developers build a housing estate.
These houses are the most secure design in the world. One of the features of the Encryption House is that they are all laid out exactly the same. The stuff inside each house is different, but the structure of each house is exactly the same. They are completely burglar-proof. Most of the people who live in the housing estate are good, law-abiding citizens. I’m one of those law-abiding citizens. I bought a house in the estate, and I’m very happy with it and feel confident that my stuff will never be stolen.

Guy Fawkes also bought one of the houses. But Mr Fawkes is up to no good. the government are watching him closely, because they think he is planning to plant a bomb and blow up the Houses of Parliament. The police want to arrest him before he plants the bomb, but they don’t have enough evidence. He probably has his plot written down in a notebook inside his burglar-proof Encryption House, but the police can’t get to it (Encryption Houses even stop warranted police officers from getting into the house — that is how secure the house design is).

The government passes a law forcing Encryption Housing Developers to dig a secret tunnel into Guy Fawkes’ Encryption House. The tunnel exit into Mr Fawkes’ house is placed there without him knowing. The entrance to the tunnel is on Back Alley Way in Internetborough. The entrance is well-hidden, and only the government know where it is.
Because Encryption Housing Developers had to dig a tunnel into Mr Fawkes’ house, they had to dig a tunnel into every other Encryption House in the housing estate, so that they would all stay exactly the same. Unlike normal houses, if one Encryption House is modified, they all have the same structural modifications. And every Encryption House owner is oblivious to this weakness in the security of their home.

But that’s OK. The government only wants to get into Guy Fawkes’ house. It isn’t interested in my stuff in my house, or my other lovely law-abiding neighbours.

The government sneak into Guy Fawkes’ Encryption House, find the documents describing his plot to plant the bomb, and armed with this evidence they arrest him, preventing a terrorist attack.

—

Sarah is part of a criminal gang of very sophisticated burglars called The Hack. She and her gang members like exploring all the side streets and back alleys in Internetborough for secret passages. There are many secret passages in Internetborough.

A little while after Guy Fawkes is imprisoned, Sarah wanders down Back Alley Way. She spends a few hours looking in the wheely bins, in the stormwater drains, through the cracks in boarded up windows, kicking paving stones hoping for a loose one. She bumps a particular brick and door slides open. It’s the secret passage to all the Encryption Houses. Sarah goes and calls the rest of The Hack shows them all the Encryption Houses they can sneak into with impunity. The best thing about the secret tunnel is that the Encryption House owners won’t even know that The Hack have snuck in. What an opportunity. Now The Hack can expand from just burglary, to blackmail, identity theft, fraud, and all other kind of lucrative illegal business opportunities.

When I lived in South Africa the agony of waiting for online multimedia content to load over the crippled Internet infrastructure of the time was so unbearable that I actually spent my time writing and posting things on this blog. I mean, I was still using a dial-up modem in 2006! The screechy tweeting staccato of a 56k modem. Urgh.

Now there is an endless buffet of digital content served up into my face from all kinds of phosphorescent glass panels. And it really is endless. YouTube has autoplay, so if your chosen video clip ends, another one loads up and spews into your consciousness. Twitter is a constantly refreshing stream of vitriol. 140 characters is the perfect length for an insult, but not enough space for a considered discussion. Just swipe swipe swipe and more ping-ponging vitriol appears. It never runs out. Even mainstream news websites have infinity as a feature. You finish reading an article, and the site recommends 5 more you might like. Not necessarily vitriol, at least not until you get down to the comments section. There’s some manufactured outrage. I wonder why they are so pissed off? Click and click again.

This is the advantage of real physical newspapers and magazines. They end. Once you’ve read the articles you were interested in, and skimmed the ones you weren’t, it’s over. New pages with suggestions don’t grow out of the spine of the magazine like some sort of regenerating mutant. A cascade of written notes, filled with badly spelled anger, don’t scatter in your lap like so many advertising pamphlets. The activity of reading the magazine simply ceases. You could read it all again in the hope of eking out some new ounce of information, but really you are forced to go and do something else.

I’m going to go do something else now. How about Netflix?

(Image credit: Obsolete Screenshot #05 by orihaus via Flickr (cc-by-2.0))