The technologies designed to protect privacy have been repurposed for surveillance. The technologies deployed for surveillance are protected by the language of security.
The Inversion
The privacy-surveillance inversion is the condition in which technical infrastructure designed to enable private communication is systematically pressured by governments and intelligence agencies to incorporate backdoors and monitoring capabilities that transform privacy infrastructure into surveillance infrastructure. The inversion works through a specific rhetorical move: the conflation of the privacy of law-abiding users with the concealment of criminal and terrorist activity. This conflation is politically effective because it places privacy advocates in the position of appearing to defend criminal operational security rather than the legitimate privacy interests of the overwhelming majority of users who are not criminals. It is technically inaccurate because the mathematical properties of end-to-end encryption do not permit selective access limited to criminal communications.
The privacy-surveillance inversion is the claim that security requires the elimination of the privacy that security is supposed to protect. It is technically inaccurate, politically effective, and most costly for the institutions and individuals whose legitimate security depends on the privacy the inversion is designed to eliminate.
Discussion