Privacy and Government access
I am all for enforcing law, catching and prosecuting criminals and terrorists and preventing harm to vulnerable members of our society. I am also for protecting civil liberties, freedom, the right to decide how our personal information is collected and used and the right to defend any misrepresentation of our personal information. So it is hard to square these two and there will always be a tension to get the right balance. A few news items I have been watching over the last few weeks really made me think (again). Many countries are enacting more stringent laws to allow governments more access to our data with lower barriers to enter but allegedly more oversight or governance. For example the USA has enacted the Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Act (CISA) and the UK has the “snoopers charter” or as it is called “Investigatory Powers Bill” (to be far not enacted but almost). However how do we square giving more and more powers to the government when we can’t trust them to keep it s...