Being Open About Secrecy

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website too]

It must be tricky to be an advocate of transparency when your job involves selling serious encryption tools to government departments, large and small companies, hospitals and people who are concerned about having their bank account details hijacked from a home PC.

After all, the point about good encryption software and the systems that surround it is that they provide a way to keep your secrets secret, while open government and the effective regulation of financial services would seem to require the widest possible dissemination of all sorts of operational data, from MPs expenses to bank investment portfolios.

And once something is on a website, in an email or available for inspection through a published program interface then it is no longer secret, however well the copy on your internal network might be protected. Continue reading “Being Open About Secrecy”