What Could They Be Thinking?

The Internet is on its last legs in Namibia, Africa. There is a bill waiting to pass that would cripple the net to a point where it would be almost unusable: the banning of encryption.

Encryption is a technique which encodes all data that passes through to an undecipherable format. There are different levels of encryption, measured in “bits”, but even the lowest levels offer a great protection boost.

Getting rid of this technology would basically unlock everything online. Imagine a neighborhood, where every house has a lock and alarm system. Now imagine all of this was deactivated: absolute chaos! Anyone could break in and steal anything from anyone else.

Without encryption, some websites can’t even operate. If you ever see the lock icon in the bottom of your screen, this means the site is encrypted. Every banking site is encrypted, so none of these would work if the feature is banned. It wouldn’t just be banks and business things to go either: MySpace, FaceBook, Gmail, Skype, Yahoo… all gone.

Namibia isn’t following suit with the rest of the world either. The U.S. encourages its citizens to encrypt their networks, and their whole national security depends on it! Otherwise, terrorists could get into all of the U.S.’s sensitive documents and cause quite a bit of destruction.

This law wouldn’t even have a good effect. The truth is, this would just limit the people who are not computer savvy and need the encryption to stay safe from doing so. The people who know computers will find a way around this, and wreak havoc on the unprotected. If they don’t continue to use encryption by some deceptive means, then they will utilize some outrageous technology, such as the cryptic “steganography.”

Some citizens have the wrong attitude towards this. If you don’t have anything to hide, why remain hidden? Maybe they don’t have anything illicit to hide, but I’m sure they wouldn’t want some random hacker to get a hold of their credit card information or bank account numbers!

Besides, it is the principle of the matter. Everyone deserves some privacy, and now the government is planning to take it away. Whether or not they have something to hide, basic human rights are being violated here.

Hopefully the government will pull through, and see that whoever roused this crazy idea had little more than personal gain in mind.

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