<story><title>Encryption is a necessity</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/02/16/help-us-spread-the-word-encryption-matters/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>userbinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Companies should be encouraged to aggressively strengthen the security of their products, rather than undermine that security.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I think they should most certainly not be encouraged to secure products &lt;i&gt;against&lt;/i&gt; their users:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;philosophy&amp;#x2F;right-to-read.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;philosophy&amp;#x2F;right-to-read.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;What worries me the most about this seemingly frantic push for more encryption is that it will accelerate the proliferation and acceptance of locked-down, user-hostile devices. Security is important but so is freedom, and I feel like we&amp;#x27;ve already sacrificed too much of the latter for the former...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WireWrap</author><text>Security requires freedom, and cannot be achieved without it.  If you don&amp;#x27;t have the freedom to determine the behavior of your personal computing device, select the ways it is and isn&amp;#x27;t locked down, control updates to it, and inspect encrypted communications to&amp;#x2F;from it, that device and your usage of it are insecure.&lt;p&gt;We should not reinforce the idea that one must sacrifice freedom for security, sacrifice privacy for security, etc.  Those are false choices based on fundamentally flawed definitions of &amp;quot;secure&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;security&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Encryption is a necessity</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/02/16/help-us-spread-the-word-encryption-matters/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>userbinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Companies should be encouraged to aggressively strengthen the security of their products, rather than undermine that security.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I think they should most certainly not be encouraged to secure products &lt;i&gt;against&lt;/i&gt; their users:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;philosophy&amp;#x2F;right-to-read.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;philosophy&amp;#x2F;right-to-read.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;What worries me the most about this seemingly frantic push for more encryption is that it will accelerate the proliferation and acceptance of locked-down, user-hostile devices. Security is important but so is freedom, and I feel like we&amp;#x27;ve already sacrificed too much of the latter for the former...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>7952</author><text>We are abandoning the ability to actually listen in to what our devices are doing.  The great thing about the web is that hitting Ctrl+Shift+I shows you exactly what data is being sent or received whilst maintaining strong encryption.  If every single thing does its own encryption we end up with a set of black boxes squirting out unreadable gibberish.  Being able to verify input and output is essential.</text></comment>