Data security and communicative privacy matters. The boons of the contemporary computer era has led to people across the world using common services for security, for data processing, and for communications generally despite users’ radically different risk profiles. Few users are savvy enough to engage in code-level audits, fewer to ascertain the validity of improperly issued security certificates, and likely even fewer to guarantee that programs’ and operating systems’ updates are from the actual developers. These are problems – important problems – that need to be directly addressed by developers.
It’s always been morally wrong to be cavalier about your software’s security profile, and to just discount the potential vulnerabilities or bugs linked to your tools. Things aren’t getting better, however, on account of state actors becoming more and more sophisticated in how they target and monitor their citizens’ and residents’ communications. Consequently, the blasé attitude towards security that has (largely) focused on successful engineering over successful security in depth is a larger and larger problem. This attitude, especially when it comes to anti-circumvention and encryption software, is leading to individual users ending up seriously hurt, imprisoned, or dead.
Security is important. Speech is important. And ensuring that secure, private, speech is possible is an increasingly critical issue for parties throughout the world. Developers and companies and individuals ought to take the severity of the consequences of their actions to heart, or risk having very real blood on their hands.
Excited Pixels 