You can see my original blog article .

In a follow up speech David Cameron reiterated his desire to break encrpytion on the UK's IT systems and in a show of the "special relationship" between the UK and the US, America joined in on decrying encryption as the root cause of all terrorism.

On Wednesday FBI director James Comey briefed both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee about the problems encryption is causing the FBI and others at stopping ISIL, drug dealers, pedophiles, and other unsavory types. He described the situation as communications "going dark" for law enforcement.

Comey said that there were firms that provided encrypted end-to-end communications and yet still had the ability to read such messages as they travel through their servers, but declined repeatedly to say who these companies were or how their systems worked.

At the risk of over speculating on what the eventual plans will be, I really cannot see either country outright banning encryption or even suggesting weakening it. They know that Encryption is what drives eCommerce which is vital to both countries financial standing and it drives things like "" which, in turn, allows for more access to local councils and for more things to be done online reducing the costs of providing those services at a traditional over the counter environment.

It seems to be highly likely that the UK and the US will push forward with a plan to have some sort of encryption Master key and they'll somehow require companies to register that key with them. In essence, they'll be building a snoopers database which will become one of the most important hacking targets ever created. Should the database be compromised then the Government will have just given the keys of the digital kingdom to every terrorist out there.

Imagine what IS or any other disgruntled group could do if they can intercept commercial traffic?
Imagine the chaos they could be caused if hackers got hold of it?
And it won't just be bedroom hackers or terrorists, it will be government trained hackers of foreign nations who want to get hold of commercial data. Companies would be ruined overnight if this goes ahead.

Even if banks are excluded from this master key database it won't matter because crackable encryption will mean that things like credit card data will still be readable by people who have access to those master keys.

And that brings me to my final point, what about systems outside of the UK and the US? The cloud allows me to spin up servers in Asia and other places. If those places have don't have similar laws to the UK and US then people are free to set up strong encryption and not hand over the master keys, business will almost certainly be invited to move to places like Singapore, Dubai and China with promises of being able to conduct business securely.

Ironically, the UK Government sponsors a site called "cyberstreetwise" which have a page at https://www.cyberstreetwise.com/cyberessentials/ which offers a nice little badge should a company pass a questionnaire. One of the things in that questionnaire is related to using encryption to ensure secure digital communication.

All my questions to cyberstreetwise and to the Conservatives have gone unanswered which is funny as cyberstreetwise promotes itself with the line "please do ask us anything you need to know" and then ignores any difficult questions about the very Government that bank rolls it.

This proposed ban is going to be a very silly affair, many places have highlighted just how impractical this is. My own favourite can be read .
here