The most significant invasions of our privacy probably don't come from the government; they come from ordinary people (or not so ordinary people) trying to snoop into our lives. Whether businesses, or former lovers, these are people who are trying to find out something that we may not want them to know.
Some protection is provided by the law. But in this message we focus on tools you can use to protect yourself. If privacy is the ability to control what others know about you, there are tools cyberspace will give us to exercise that control.
The most important tool will be the use of encryption. Encryption is a technique for turning your message into gibberish, readable only by the person intended to read the message -- someone else who has the proper key. The most powerful forms of encryption have two keys: one public, the other private.
The two key system works like this. Say Alice wanted to send Bob a message, and be certain that only Bob could read that message. Bob could then give Alice his "public key." She would encrypt her message with his public key, and a program such as PGP (see the link on our Web page). Then only he could decrypt it, using his private key.
The system we have described here is somewhat cumbersome. But very soon, the system for encryption will become more automatic. Built into the web already are protocols for encrypting messages when, for example, the user is sending her credit card number. And as these technologies for encryption increase, the ease with which this kind of security can be achieved will increase as well.
All is not rosy in the world of encryption, however. Some people believe that the ability to perfectly hide the contents of a message makes it easier to send harmful, or criminal messages. The world of perfect encryption is the world of increased crime. This explains why the government is quite eager to guide the development of encryption technologies. The government wants to preserve a back door into an encrypted communication, so that if it had a warrant, it could decrypt what was said.
Many fear giving government this power. Their fear is that the government will abuse it. But government can abuse its power now - indeed quite easily in the world without encryption. Encryption would make it harder. And if encryption (even with a back door) makes it more difficult to abuse its power, then perhaps encryption would reduce the government's abuse.
Next time we talk about other techniques for reclaiming privacy in cyberspace.
authors:
| Larry Lessig | David Post | Eugene Volokh |
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