Going dark makes the Internet safer
When they talk about dark places, ooooh it sounds really scary. But you have a dark place in your home you can talk, you can meet in a park –- there are a zillion dark places the FBI will never get to and they shouldn’t because we don’t want to be monitored in our home.
— Rep Ted Lieu, The Intercept
Recently, the FBI has made it a top priority to coerce social media companies into weakening their security, over fears that the widespread use of end-to-end encryption will block their ability to intercept people’s messages. They call this problem “going dark”.
“Going dark” is the FBI’s problem, not ours.
Most people’s problem is that the communications systems we use are not secure enough.
The Internet is, fundamentally, an unsecured network. You don’t control the route your data takes or the nodes on that route. You cannot prevent the service provider being hacked. You can’t fix security flaws in mobile internet standards or stop criminals intercepting your phonecalls and text messages with easily available equipment.
But that insecure system is still the best we have, and we still want to send private messages. The only practical way to do that is with communication software that uses such strong encryption that has no known way of being broken. People have every right to use such software even if it makes the FBI’s job more difficult in the long run, since privacy is a basic human right but solving crimes is not.
If your comms software is “dark” to the FBI, that’s excellent news for you because it means it’s also dark to the multitude of genuine threats: criminals, stalkers, identity thieves, blackmailers, hackers, foreign agents, industrial spies and eavesdroppers, to name a few.
It’s only “going dark” from the perspective of the FBI and malicious actors. From everyone else’s point of view, it’s making the Internet safe.