Protect your privacy with your life

A couple of years ago I visited Nigeria in the middle of an election. I was worried I might get kidnapped by Boko Haram.

But, upon arrival at Abuja, where soldiers inspected my passport as if it were a bomb, I quickly realised that terrorists aren't nearly as frightening as a paranoid government. The state has far greater capability than its tinpot opponents.

In the wake of the attack by Adrian Ajao (Muslim name Khalid Masood) on Westminster, Amber Rudd, Britain's Home Secretary, demanded that companies like WhatsApp allow the government a way around their encryption so that security forces can access messages.

Now, if we could make an exception for Ajao's missives, I'd be all for letting the state have them - but the problem is that an exception to a rule inevitably undermines the rule itself. The rule here is that people ought to be able to communicate without anyone else knowing what's being said. We call this privacy.

Of course, privacy has always been "negotiable". Before spying went digital, the state could go through your letters. Then it learnt how to tap your phone. When the internet came along, however, the power balance briefly shifted.

The Egyptian dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak clung on to power until 2011 with the help of prisons, corruption and control of newspapers and TV. It was too arthritic, however, to keep up with the kids making revolution online. The pro-democracy protests in Tahrir Square, co-ordinated through social media, brought down Mubarak and came to symbolise the Arab Spring. One activist, Fawaz Rashed, explained: "We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to co-ordinate, and YouTube to tell the world."

But it was a double-edged sword. The Egyptian authorities started to monitor social media to see what its critics were up to. The state can adapt very quickly.

In 2013, it was revealed that the US National Security Agency had been collecting data on people's online activity. Here was an example of a government agency moving so fast in concert with technological change that it had gone beyond the reach of scrutiny and constraint.

Russia is accused of meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. The regime certainly uses fake accounts to drum up political intrigue online, and has been caught trying to collect the personal data of its opponents via social media.

Imagine if Russia had the capacity to decrypt messages related to banking or security. Give the British government access to WhatsApp and it's only a matter of time before Moscow engineers a way in there, too.

So the internet, which was supposed to liberate us, has created new tools of surveillance and oppression.

Nevertheless, some messaging apps still offer a source of encrypted resistance, a way of building a private sphere the state can't reach. Last year, about 450 Iranians were picked up for using messaging services, including WhatsApp - and that underscores a critical point about privacy. Yes, encryption can be used by theocrats to plot terrorism. But it can also be used by liberals to resist theocracy. For every Adrian Ajao messaging hate, there might be a gay man messaging his lover, or a daughter defying a regime by posting photos of herself without wearing a headscarf.

Britain only wants to catch the bad guys, you might say. True, but the government's case is so full of holes that it almost invites us to see another, darker motive.

Being able to decode Ajao's messages wouldn't have prevented his crime because he wasn't a subject of interest to the security services before the attack. WhatsApp cannot share his messages because they are encrypted from user to user, and the company is not supposed to be able to read them (that's the damn point).

It's theorised that the only way spooks could crack the code is through creating a "back door" into WhatsApp's software. But this would compromise the privacy of all users. The government would not be given a key to one door but a skeleton key that could open any door it likes.

In a constitutional democracy, rights are supposed to be safeguarded by laws. I have been to countries where that is not the case, where privacy is regarded as a threat to order. And when a state decides that privacy is its enemy, it has armies, policemen, lawyers and spies to help destroy it. We should always resist. Always assert your precious right to be left alone.

- © The Daily Telegraph