Supreme Court rulings show how technology and the law evolve
I would like to take a step back to take in a broader, bigger picture than usual in this article, moving across time as well as into the legal sphere. Technology isn’t just hardware and software; it’s a fundamental component of every aspect of our lives and our society.
When U.S. Attorney General William Barr recently admitted that adding backdoors for law enforcement made encryption less effective, it was, surprisingly, news. But for a long time, the U.S. government had been in public denial, saying that state surveillance and access could exist happily with top-level security. Now, as renowned expert Bruce Schneier wrote, we can have a real debate about this trade-off:
“With this change, we can finally have a sensible policy conversation. Yes, adding a backdoor increases our collective security because it allows law enforcement to eavesdrop on the bad guys. But adding that backdoor also decreases our collective security because the bad guys can eavesdrop on everyone. This is exactly the policy debate we should be having – not the fake one about whether or not we can have both security and surveillance.”
Whether you are for unbreakable encryption in public hands or not, in these matters it is essential to admit that we cannot have everything or make everyone happy all the time.
As our technology evolves, our laws must adapt to keep up. Entirely new laws, even entirely new regulatory branches, are required to address new inventions as they become commonplace. Millions of automobiles could not be regulate ..
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