Excuse me, citizen, did you packet this data yourself?
Would you trust the police – by extension, the state – with your data, personal or corporate? Bit of a problem there, especially with so many governments constantly banging on about forcing open encryption standards whether you like it or not. Yet that's the accommodation we've reached with the state over hundreds of years of postal services and old school telecommunications. We even consent to the massive increase in our legal vulnerability surface that comes when we buy a car.
And there are points in our virtual lives where trust just has to be given, if not in the inherent goodness of organizations but at least in the ability to take any misdemeanors to task. Even with end-to-end encryption and without active malicious attacks, your ISP and mobile providers know a great deal about you. Run services in the cloud as an organization, or use a VPN as an individual, and that's a lot more implicit trust.
With attention to transparency, responsibility, and accountability, the state's approach to controlling cybercrime would be a lot more effective. Cybercrime and its control is at heart a problem of data acquisition and pattern recognition, like all sleuthing, and the more you can do of both the better at it you can be – and the greater the risks of abuse.
What sort of automated data gathering would you consent to, if you knew and trusted the purpose, nature and limits of that? If there was a national endpoint security system, would you opt in? How would you decide? These are very hard questions that go to the heart of the social contract, but that's a conversation we'll have to have with ourselves and with the politicians.
Criminality didn't end when the Wild West got its rule of law, and we never get the police we really want, just those we can put up with. We know we can't put up with cybersecurity that demands a defense budget-sized investment in return for a global crimewave. We need a better sheriff: let's draw up the job description. ®
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