What the Heck is Encryption?

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It’s not as hard as it sounds. But it’s weird. And it’s weird in a particular way. The usual thing to say is that encryption is what computers do, and everyone else has to use more old-fashioned methods. But from where I sit, encryption looks very much like a human activity. It’s very strange: machines are doing something that feels like the sort of thing people do when they’re being creative.

And this weirdness may explain something about why encryption seems so hard for people to understand. If it were just a matter of math, then you’d expect that mathematicians would be good at understanding it, and everyone else would be bad at it. But that doesn’t seem to be how things work out. The math is easy; the implications are hard.

What are those implications? Well, they lead me to ask questions like: How much privacy do we want? What kind of privacy do we want? And what kind of society can we have if we get the kind of privacy we want?

With regard to the question of how we should think about encryption, I’m with Brin. We should think of encryption as a form of speech, protected by the First Amendment. Encryption is clearly expressive in nature; it’s intended to convey a message. And that message can be communicated only to those who have the key.

Encryption also seems to meet the Supreme Court’s standard for being an expressive activity: it conveys information. The information it conveys is the key; without it, the encrypted data are gibberish. But unlike some forms of speech—the words of a top-secret memo, say—encryption cannot be understood without specialized equipment and knowledge. Most people don’t know what an RSA public key is, much less how to find one on a website; most people don’t know how to use an email client to encrypt or decrypt messages; and most people don’t know what a VPN is or how it works.

The fact that encryption requires specialized knowledge doesn’t make it any less expressive. As long as there are some people who understand what’s going on—people who have the key—the fact that others don’t understand it doesn’t mean that the encrypted data aren’t saying anything. It just means that they’re not getting

Encryption is a way of making information secret, by converting it into a form that can’t be understood without special knowledge. The translation back again is called “decryption.”

Encryption is the basis of all kinds of security on the Internet. It’s used to send credit-card numbers safely, and to protect your email, web searches, instant messages, phone calls, and more.

I’m not going to try to explain how encryption works. If you understand the math behind it, that’s great! But if you don’t understand it yet, don’t worry. I’m just going to give you enough information so that you can make informed decisions about how much risk you want to take on in order to keep your information secret.

Encryption isn’t just privacy, it’s power. It makes it possible to build systems that protect the powerless from exploitation by the powerful. It makes it possible for journalists to communicate securely with whistle-blowers, activists with their allies, and ordinary people with each other.

The trend towards concentration of wealth is driven by the concentration of power: power to make rules that benefit the powerful more than the powerless, power to bend laws in their favor, and power to use surveillance to track down anyone who might challenge them. In a world where most wealth is controlled by a small number of people, privacy is power: privacy is the ability of individuals to determine which rules apply to them, and which laws they are subject to.

The powers behind mass surveillance, mass censorship, and mass incarceration will fight hard to prevent their loss of power. They will use lies and force and violence. But armed with encryption, we have some chance at resisting them. Let’s take it.

If you have information you want to keep private, encryption is the best way to do it. Encryption is also a way of making sure that only people who are supposed to get information get it. For example, when you buy something online, encryption is what makes sure that no one else can see it. Even though you’re sharing it with a company, there’s no practical way for someone else to learn what’s in your shopping cart unless they know the key.

Thus encryption has become the basis for many of the most important infrastructures of our economy and society, like credit card processing and e-commerce. If you want to ensure that your transactions remain secure, or if you want to make sure that your data stays confidential, encryption is how you do it.

The widespread use of encryption means that an attack on encrypted data would be an attack on the whole economy. And because almost everything we do now involves computers, an attack on computers would be an attack on our whole society.

Although this sounds extreme, some people think we should engage in exactly this kind of cyberwarfare anyway . They argue that since cyberattacks are inevitable, we should develop and deploy attack software first, so we can launch our own attacks before someone else does. But there

Professional writers know that anyone trying to sound authoritative about a technical subject is likely to make mistakes. They know that the best way to avoid mistakes is to play it safe: never make any predictions or assertions when you don’t have solid facts to back you up. The worst sin is to “attempt a forecast, without having adequate data.”

The result of all this is that your typical popular science book can be very dull. When I read them, I often find myself thinking that the author should have just made up some stories out of whole cloth rather than risk making a fool of him- or herself.

How do they manage to live with themselves? One clue is that they know how much they are letting us down. Another is that despite their caution, they are almost always wrong.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

There are many reasons for this. One is that there is a lot of bad art out there. I’m not talking about people who are trying to be bad artists; I mean the commercial art that you see in airports and on book covers and so on. The output of Hollywood is another kind of bad art, but in its case the reason is that a few people have an astonishing amount of power over what gets made. In any field, the talent tends to get pushed towards the top, while the hacks stay at the bottom.

The result—and this has been true since long before the Internet—is that most art out there is bad. And when people talk about “art,” they usually mean this kind of bad art, which they wish were better. They want life to imitate bad art more than it already does.

What they don’t realize is that all the good stuff came first. You can’t get something from nothing; if you want good work these days, your best bet is to find an older artist who hasn’t gotten popular yet, or a younger artist who hasn’t yet given up. This doesn’t mean contemporary artists aren’t good; it just means their competition isn’t very good yet.

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