Watch an ISP prove why banning encryption won’t work in under 5 minutes

Thomas McMullan Read more November 6, 2015

With this week’s announcement of the draft Investigatory Powers Bill, communications privacy has been put up against the wall.

Among the various reactions – from positive remarks about the inclusion of judiciary oversight to cries against steps towards legitimising mass surveillance – was the opinion that the bill seeks to undermine the effectiveness of encryption.

One of the dissenting voices speaking against Theresa May’s surveillance plans was Adrian Kennard, owner of the internet service provider (ISP) Andrews & Arnold. At the time, Kennard wrote a blog post about the potential impractical nature of ISPs logging customer data. Now, a video has surfaced from earlier in the year in which Kennard shows that sending secret messages is incredibly hard to stop.

Contemporary encryption may be tangled up with computers, but, as Kennard neatly demonstrates, its roots are firmly placed in the pre-digital world.

“This isn’t about technology. It’s about privacy,” says Kennard in the video. “You could ban every app, every computer program, every system and it would still be possible for people to send a message that’s secret and cannot be read by anyone else. Even a child could do it.”