Most people, most people with what can be called common sense and a fair amount of decency are familiar with the concept of personal privcy and what it entails. In short its the expectation that some parts of daily life are private and therefore hidden from prying eyes. As an example most of us expect that what goes on in our homes is unseen by others due to the general sentiment that there has to be a place in our world where we can, metaforically speaking, let our hair down and dont worry about what other people think of us. Websters dictionary defines the word privacy as "the quality or state of being apart from company or observation" as well as "freedom from unauthorized intrustion" and we can think of it as one of the principal freedoms in any human society. We should have freedom from observation by a third party and generally be able to be on our own, free from prying eyes. And its not just because we want to, its part of our core as human beings being able to have a space of our own where we are left at our own devices. So engrained is this expectation of privacy that we generally dont think about it. We take it for granted, just like we take it for granted when we lock the door in a toilet that we have the privacy to go about our business. Most people view doing their bodily functions as an act of privacy and like to keep it that way. The same goes for conversation. We all expect that what is said in close quarters should remain private, or at least we make the assumption it is so. The reality is the concept of personal privacy and privacy in general is kind of a mess when it comes to laws. Most countries have at least rudimentary guardrails securing peoples rights but it all gets hazy when it comes to expecations and implementations. While one country would defend your rights to walk around naked in your house another country will prosecute you for indecent behavior, even if it is in your own home. On top of that the state usually gives itself a wide berth on intruding on your privacy in the form of surveilance laws deemed necessary for the security of the society. Some countries are better than others but generally speaking there are lines in the sand. The western world often prides itself of being a stalwart of privacy while pointing out the fallacies in other parts of the world but it really is just all a lot of propaganda because the western world has its problems with privacy and especially digital personal privacy which many western governments have come to hate with a passion and its all due to one key element in the modern online world, encryption. But before we continue let dive a bit into encryption and why it is so important for the modern online world and lets start with some definition to create some clarity. Encryption, in essense by the terms of cryptography, is a the process of transforming information in such a way that only authorized people can see it. In other words, a way to make information, pretty much any information, not perceivable by any other people than those who are allowed to perceive it. Information here can be text, audio or video, you get the gist. Encryption on its own is the heart of cryptograhy which in turn is the art of practice or study of encrypting information. With me so far? Its basically the art of making sure only authorized people can see things. When we say authorized people it simply means people who are allowed to perceive the information. It can be you, me, anyone as long as they are the intended recipients. You might ask whats so special about that? Isnt that just hiding things away? Well, yes and usually for a good reason but we will come to that. Suffice to say encryption has existed for a long time, it has in fact been with us in one form or the other since the early days of civilisation and people found the need to hide information from others and almost always they had reasons of their own to do it, being it secret messages for business reasons, for military reasons, political reasons or otherwize. The need to conseal information has always been there and through the centuries encryption was the privilege of the rich and powerful and the occational eccentric who wrote everything in code. The common people would have very little idea encryption existed or what to use it for and thats how it was all the way up until the internet was created in the latter part of the twentieth century. Then things changed and for a good reason. You see, the primordial internet was a very open place. Everything in it was written in and sent in plain text which meant that everybody could read and listen to everything someone else wrote or said, i.e. the internet was not a place where you wanted to keep a secret or say something in private. Plain text here means its readable by everybody and while that in itself wasnt a huge problem or a philosophical question in the beginning it dawned on people that as the internet grew and its purposes would multiply that everybody reading everything perhaps wasnt the greatest idea of all. As an instance, you would not do your online banking in clear text so everybody could read your password, your account number and your transactions. So it became a philosophical problem. On one hand were those who fought for keeping the internet free as in free for everyone to read what anyone did and on the other hand were those who argued that some sort of privacy should exist on the internet. It was a heated debate with the hippie nerds stauncly against any privacy but they would in the end amount for a minority so the quest to create privacy on the internet began and the easiest way by far was looking to math because in the end encryption is just a form of math and some really creative people got busy and started creating encryption standards for various parts of the internet which in time would develop and mature and as the internet grew more and more would become the underpinnings of pretty much everything internet. It didnt happen overnight and not without some growing pains. However, a new concept which had started in quiet corners now exploded to the scene and that was the notion of personal privacy on the internet. You see, as people started using the internet more and more it became evident the inate feeling we have for privacy in the physical world should also exist on the internet and a movement grew which demanded privacy for people. It became very loud and the internet listened so to speak. With increased privacy awareness of the public the internet became more privacy minded and it was all defined by encryption, the one thing in the universe which could keep secrets in an increasingly online world. And thus it became so that encryption became slowly but surely one of the underpinnings of the internet we know today. We all expect our information to be private and that our journeys through the web to be private as well. There is of course a great deal about online anonymity in this history but its a whole topic in itself and wont be touched here. You might ask as this point, well, what does all this have to do with me and I would swiftly say, everything. Most if not all of your online activites are dictated by encryption in one way or the other. When you browse the web, do online banking, browse social media, chat with people online, its all encrypted to make your information unavailable to prying eyes and there is a lot of them out there wanting to see your data, from common thieves to governments. Encryption is foundational to ensure privacy on the internet and for the first time in human history it exists for the masses to use and protect themselves. This is a key point, encryption to the masses. It has enabled us to do things, good and bad which were unthinkable forty years ago and it is so good at doing its job we kinda forget its there, we take it for granted. For the first time common people can communicate across the globe securely and in private. It has never happened before and it is a really big thing cause now we can exchange opinions in peace without having to worry about the infamous Big Brother. And that brings us to a growing problem. As I mentioned before, governments hate encryption with a passion, especially in the western world. You see, as open and progressive as the western world has thought itself to be there has always been the issue about privacy and the right of people to personal privacy. For sure, many western countries have relativly strong laws in that regards but then again so have been the laws to interfer in peoples privacy and that is mainly due to governments having had established and powerful ways to negate privacy when they se fit. We all know of the concept wire tap, the ability to surveil phone lines. It has existed almost as long as telephone lines have existed. Same goes for physical surveilance and right out spying on people. The means to do that are numerous and well established and governments have for the longest time been experts on how to go about. And since it was the business of government and people having adapted to established ways of breaking their privacy for most of the times it never became an issue on a broader scale. The reality is, people have always been defenceless against government surveilance and when cases of crass governmental overreach have been exposed it has usually led to changes which have sharpened the rules. One can say an equilibrium existed but that would all change when the internet started growing and online encryption became widly available and used. Governments and expecially law enforcement started loosing sight of those they wanted to surveil and with the advent of encrypted chat programs a new problem arose for the them. People of interest stopped talk on the phone, send physical mail, meet up but started to lean in heavily on the chat programs. In essence it meant governments and law enforcement went blind and suddenly an easy task became much more difficult. The same would happen with electronic mail which could be encrypted and web surfing as more and more sites would enable encryption. In other words, for the first time in history governments were unable to establish methods to break privacy and the power to protect personal privacy had been handed over to people through encryption. Naturally this caused widespread panic within governments and with law enforcement as the ugly truth became more apparant. Governments are fine with people having their communications as long as they, the governments can intercept those communications at will and this is the crux of the matter. Governments, no matter how liberal or progressive will always have interest to put their nose into peoples affairs and they see it almost as their gods given will. People simply arent asked nor in reality should they have expectations of personal privacy apart how the governments define it. In other words, online encryption broke the equilibrium which had stood for hundreds of years and posed a threat to the darker sides of government. The net effect of this became soon all too apparant. Most western governments started to fight viciously against encryption in any form and they use insidius ways to do it. The cases against encryption are paired with criminality, child abuse, national security, terrorism, basically every negative aspect of a society has been used by governments and law enforcements as weapons to either ban or interfer in encryption to weaken it and the official cause is always to protect people in one way or the other. The reality is this is as much of a bucket of muck as it could be. Governments arent interested in protecting us the people, they are interested in what we say or do to protect themselves and excert their powers on to the population, aka, controlling the information. You see, there is nothing a government hates more than free communication because it denotes lack of control and western governments hate the notion with all their black litttle hearts. But there is a problem. As much as governments and law enforcement hate encryption they cannot deny it has become the underpinning of the internet. Everything depends on it, lawful and unlawful activities alike so simply flatly banning encryption wouldnt work. Modern day societies would collapse within a week if encryption was banned and it enforced as we are so dependant on it for pretty much everything which is why in later days governments have come up with a new trick. Instead of blanket banning encryption they now want to enforce weakening of cryptographic standards in order for governments to have back doors into systems using encruption and now they want to ban methods of use like VPN and yet again the main arguments are criminality and the children. Its always the children being used to justify the ugliness of society. In reality, backdoors into encrypted systems tantamounts to breaking the encryption or weakening it to the point it is completely insecure and ripe for hacking. Due to the nature of encryption you either have it or you dont. Weakening essentially means making it insecure and false protection and as for VPN, a lot of IT infrastructure depends on VPN for necessary protection against criminal entities and also for lawful necessity of protection of information. To summarise, the need of western governments to stick their noses into our private affairs combined with with their inability and lack of interest to do necessary law enforcement is going to be the premise of us the people standing to loose our sole protection on the internet against prying eyes, criminal entities including governments and law enforcements and taking away our ability to protect ourselves. In the end this is a power play. Governments hate the notion we have privacy and are doing their worst to strip away our capacity for it. This is in essence a war initiated by the political arms of societies against the populations and due to politicians being hopelessly ill equipped, simply dumb or for their political motivations they see it as their mission to strip us of basic human rights online. That goes across the spectrum, from the most left leaning governments to the most far right ones. They simply dont like we have power of our own as it threatnes their rule of power and as is classical with politicians, they react to threats with the ban hammer without giving the consequences any concideration. Its therefore up to us people to fight against this iminent threat against our online wellbeing and security and take the fight to the politicians and make them understand encryption is an essential tool of protection in any modern day society and it should should not now nor never ever be compromised. Too much is at stake here.