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Why security back-doors for governments are a bad idea

Bruce Schneier has written yet another spectacularly lucid piece on why the the FBI shouldn’t be able to force technology vendors in the USA to add back-doors to their products.

The current proposal which is probably going to get the backing of the Obama administration, will levy fines of $25,000 per day on technology vendors that don’t add back-doors to their systems to allow government monitoring.

Schneier argues that history has shown that those back-doors are inevitably used by criminals and foreign governments with ill intent and leave people, the vast majority of whom aren’t criminals, less secure and less free.

 

 

 

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My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.