ABSTRACT
Revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies’ widespread surveillance in the summer of 2013 have accelerated America’s path toward a second critical battle over public cryptography. Because so much more of our society is now online, Crypto War II will be a far more devastating conflagration than the Crypto War of the 1990s-one that pits our fundamental right to control the computers and smart devices that are becoming an everyday part of our lives against a combination of corporate and government interests. While the Summer of Snowden has received widespread media coverage, the potential alignment of private and public sector surveillance interests pose a far greater threat to free communication in the 21st century than we’ve yet realized.
Revelations about the NSA and other intelligence agencies’ widespread surveillance in the summer of 2013 have accelerated America’s path toward a second critical battle over public cryptography. Because so much more of our society is now online, Crypto War II will be a far more devastating conflagration than the Crypto War of the 1990s-one that pits our fundamental right to control the computers and smart devices that are becoming an everyday part of our lives against a combination of corporate and government interests. While the Summer of Snowden has received widespread media coverage, the potential alignment of private and public sector surveillance interests pose a far greater threat to free communication in the 21st century than we’ve yet realized.
