Britpop

David Cameron says there should be no “means of communication” which “we cannot read” – and no doubt many in his party will agree with him, politically. But if they understood the technology, they would be shocked to their boots [..]If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police [..] , and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability [..]But this is just for starters. David Cameron doesn’t understand technology very well, so he doesn’t actually know what he’s asking for.For David Cameron’s proposal to work, he will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of his jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you’ve downloaded hasn’t been tampered with.Cameron is not alone here. The regime he proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it) [..]