Why encryption is so important

There have been countless cases of police abusing their power and illegally searching through peoples' electronic devices. This is all too common in our post-9/11 police state society. There are various laws that govern whether or not your electronic device, whether it is a phone, tablet, or smart watch, can be searched through. But whether it is a legal search or not you can protect yourself from it. You do not have to incriminate yourself by giving up your electronic device to the police. Today we have encryption technology available which can completely lock your information away from anyone. The amount of computing power required to access this information is so great that not even the NSA could decrypt it (for now...). The question is, why doesn't anyone use it?

Why don't you have your entire computer fully encrypted? Or your phone? Today I read an article about a woman who was pulled over and arrested for DUI. The officer asked her for the password to her iPhone and then searched through her photos and sent them to other officers. While the government doesn't seem to be willing to reform this pattern of abuse within our police state, we can protect ourselves from this threat by encrypting all of our devices. In addition, we can also invoke our fifth amendment rights when asked for the passwords to our devices.

So why does all this matter? Maybe you have nothing to hide and don't care at who looks at your data? Consider that there are other people that do have things to hide. Recently, the FBI announced that it is very unhappy with apple's decision to make iMessage fully encrypted and only accessible to the people who sent and are receiving the message, not even apple itself. So now the FBI and various other government agencies are trying to scare the public into believing that if they don't have access then very bad things will happen. By using these fear buzzwords such as "terrorists" and "child molestors" they are trying to convince the public that it is in their interest for all these government agency to have full access to all their social conversations.

The problem with this logic is that the people that want to keep their conversations private have many many other tools they can use for such purposes. So what is more important? People having the freedom to have completely private conversations with other people or saving at most 19 lives from terrorism (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/h-a-goodman/of-the-17891-deaths-from_b_5818082.html) which would unlikely be saved even if law enforcement agencies had access to the conversations of those terrorists.

The main point I am trying to make here is that we should all start using encryption to our advantage. Whether it is to prevent the abuse of the power abusing police state or just because we value our privacy and think that nobody else should be allowed to snoop in on our conversations. My belief is that your information should be for your eyes only and for nobody else to snoop on.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/chp-officers-reportedly-stole-cell-phone-photos-from-women-in-custody/

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/h-a-goodman/of-the-17891-deaths-from_b_5818082.html