Just as we don't know how to make knives that only cut in beneficial ways, we also don't know how to make computers that only run desirable programs.

Every computer can run every program, including ones that the user doesn't want (viruses), or that the manufacturer doesn't want (ad-blockers). No one knows how to make a computer that is *almost* Turing-complete. There's no such thing as "Turing-complete minus one."

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We can't make a computer that only runs the programs the manufacturer has authorized - all we can do is criminalize the act modifying your own computer to do what you tell it to, even if the manufacturer objects:

memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10…

I've devoted a lot of my life to exploring the policy implications of this amazing fact, but that's not the only amazing, exceptional thing about technology.

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There's another way in which digital technology has produced something genuinely, civilizationally novel: encryption.

Encryption - scrambling data so that it can only be read by its intended recipient - is an age-old project for both the authorities (who used ciphers to keep their secrets safe since the time of the Caesars) and for those who would overthrow them (revolutionary movements have always used codes to protect themselves from the authorities they sought to dethrone).

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But WWII ushered in a new era, in which encryption (and attempts to break it) went digital, as Alan Turing and the codebreakers of Bletchley Park turned themselves to a computer-aided mathematics of scrambling and descrambling. In the decades that followed, a modern form of encryption emerged, one that was powerful beyond the wildest dreams of the Caesars and their revolutionary adversaries.

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Modern, computerized encryption can scramble data to the point where it is literally *unscramblable* by an unauthorized party. In the eyeblink moment between you pressing the camera button on your phone and the resulting image being saved to its mass storage, the bits that make up that image are scrambled.

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That scrambling is so thorough that even if every hydrogen atom in the universe were made into a computer, and even if all those computers were put to work guessing at the key, we would run out of time and universe before we ran out of keys.

Even futuristic, experimental technologies like quantum computing that may revolutionize codebreaking are also revolutionizing scrambling itself:

signal.org/blog/pqxdh/

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Quantum Resistance and the Signal Protocol

The Signal Protocol is a set of cryptographic specifications that provides end-to-end encryption for private communications exchanged daily by billions of people around the world.

^{Signal Messenger}

The history of encryption is seriously fraught. Until the early 1990s, the NSA classed working encryption as a munition and banned civilian access to a whole branch of mathematics. It wasn't until Cindy Cohn - then a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, now its executive director - convinced a court that the First Amendment protected the right to publish computer code, that we were all able to gain access to this essential technology.

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Today, this safeguards your messages, files, banking transactions, and the software updates for your car's brakes, your pacemaker, and the informatics on airplanes. Cohn has announced her retirement from EFF in 2026, and while she will be sorely missed, we do have her memoir, *Privacy's Defender*, to look forward to:

mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248…

Privacy's Defender

From the very beginning, Cindy Cohn was driven by a fundamental question: can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Privacy’...

^{SupaduDev (MIT Press)}

The legalization of encryption was a starting gun for the internet itself, as true information security entered the picture and pervaded every part of service design. Every security crisis, every scandal (e.g. Snowden), jolted the effort to encrypt the internet forward, and in this way, much of the internet lurched into a state we can call "encrypted by default."

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But even as this privacy-preserving technology was perfected and made ubiquitous, something weird and contradictory happened: mass surveillance *also* took off online. The ad-tech industry - and its handmaidens, the data-broker industry - rigged the game so that our private activities were only encrypted in such a way as to defend *their* privacy, but not ours.

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Our data is encrypted in transit to the servers we interact with, and when it is at rest on those servers' mass storage devices, but it is *not* encrypted in a way that prevents companies from data-mining it, or decrypting it and selling it on or giving it away or combining it with surveillance data purchased or traded from others.

This isn't an inevitability: it's a *choice*. The ubiquity of surveillance in the age of encryption is a policy choice.

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The reason companies don't encrypt our data so that they can't use it against us is because *they don't have to*. Congress hasn't updated American consumer privacy law since 1988, when they passed a law that prohibits video store clerks from disclosing our VHS rentals:

pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/pri…

Why hasn't Congress updated our privacy rights since *Die Hard* was in theaters?

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Because American cops and spies *love* commercial internet surveillance. Tech companies and data brokers are a source of fine-grained, off-the-books, warrantless surveillance data that the American state is totally dependent on. There is no difference between "commercial surveillance" and "government surveillance" - they are a fused symbiote and neither could survive without the other:

pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/pub…

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Governments have hated encryption since the Clinton era, and have been attempting to subvert it since computers came in beige boxes and modems screamed in agony every time you tried to look at the internet:

eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/clip…

It's no mystery why we don't have federal bans on facial recognition - if we did, ICE wouldn't be able to nonconsensually, warrantlessly steal your face and store it for 15 years (at least):

404media.co/you-cant-refuse-to…

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You Can't Refuse To Be Scanned by ICE's Facial Recognition App, DHS Document Says

Photos captured by Mobile Fortify will be stored for 15 years, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, the document says.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

Why did the EU allow Ireland to facilitate mass surveillance for a decade after the GDPR's passage? Because European authorities *also* hate encryption and say that it is a "totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services":

eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/chat…

The internet *could* be the most privacy-preserving communications medium in history. Instead, it has ushered in an era of nightmarish surveillance.

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Chat Control Is Back on the Menu in the EU. It Still Must Be Stopped

The European Union Council is once again debating its controversial message scanning proposal, aka “Chat Control,” that would lead to the scanning of private conversations of billions of people.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

This isn't a technology problem. It's a *policy* problem. Criminals spy on us online because our governments wanted to spy on us online, so they let corporations spy on us online.

Imagine what the internet would look like today if, in its early regulatory moments, our elected representatives had *demanded* privacy, rather than trying to ban it. Sure, some corporations would have spied on us anyway, and criminals would have done their best to compromise our privacy.

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But criminals and rogue firms wouldn't have been able to attract capital to engage in conduct that was likely to give rise to massive fines and criminal prosecutions for violating the privacy laws Congress never bothered to write for us.

Think of it this way: sure, there are e-commerce sites that are just scams, that take your money and never ship you goods. Those sites don't have IPOs, they're not listed on stock exchanges, and they get shut down or blocked.

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They exist in the shadows, not in the light. Imagine if that was the kind of commercial surveillance industry we'd gotten: marginal, shadowy, illegal, forever on the run. There would still have been some bad privacy invasions, but these would have been *crimes*, not Harvard Business Review case-studies:

hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.asp…

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(And before you email me about that one time Paypal closed your account and kept your money or Ebay wouldn't give you a refund, sure, that's right, those things suck, and the companies should face penalties for them, but their *business model* isn't stealing money from their customers; but Google and Meta and Apple's business model is 100% stealing *data* from their customers.)

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Instead of treating data theft the way we treat monetary theft, we're now increasingly treating monetary theft like data theft. The legislative formalization of cryptocurrency will now allow companies to steal your money with the same blissful lack of consequence as Google faced for stealing your private information:

citationneeded.news/issue-89/

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Issue 89 – Crypto wins in Washington with midnight calls, chocolate bars, and a $141 million threat

Trump stands to profit from a $2 billion bitcoin bet as the crypto industry pushes through bills aimed at bolstering the sector

^{Molly White (Citation Needed)}

We're rounding the corner on a decade of the fight against Big Tech, and the efforts to cut it down to size. These keep foundering on the political economy of crushing an all-powerful monopolist - namely, that it is all-powerful.

You can't tax Big Tech:

canada.ca/en/department-financ…

You can't break it up:

thebignewsletter.com/p/a-judge…

Donald Trump has made it clear that he'd rather let Putin annex Brussels than allow the EU to fine tech companies:

cnn.com/2025/09/05/tech/google…

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A Judge Lets Google Get Away with Monopoly

Judge Amit Mehta had a chance to restore some semblance of the rule of law when he handed down a remedy decision in the Google case. He didn't. Google won this round. And Wall Street is rejoicing.

^{Matt Stoller (BIG by Matt Stoller)}

Breakups, taxes and fines are all forms of *redistribution*, which seek to address the harms of monopoly *after* the monopoly has been formed. The failure to make privacy protections as inviolable as financial protections is a missed opportunity for *predistribution*. Bans on data collection, mining, and sale would have prevented these monopolies from forming in the first place. Predistribution is *far* more effective than *redistribution*:

jacobin.com/2025/10/predistrib…

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Predistributive Measures Are Essential to Reducing Inequality

The welfare state is essential for keeping the nonworking population out of poverty. But we shouldn’t discount the role of predistributive measures like strong unions and minimum wage laws in reducing inequality.

^jacobin.com

It's amazing to realize that the privacy-invading internet has somehow beaten the encrypted internet. It's crazy that the only entity that will promise to encrypt your data beyond the reach of a data broker, an ad-tech giant, or a government is a *ransomware criminal*, who will also encrypt your data beyond *your* reach:

wired.com/story/state-of-ranso…

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It didn't have to be this way. This wasn't a technology failure. It wasn't a commercial failure. It was a policy failure. Since the 1990s, whenever push came to shove, governments decided that they would rather preserve *their* ability to spy on us than keep us safe from *private* spying.

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I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller *Enshittification*!

Catch me next in #Miami, #Burbank and #Libson!

Full schedule with dates and links at:

pluralistic.net/tour

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