Your Privacy is Under Attack from Terrifying New Laws

In recent years, a wave of invasive new surveillance laws has swept across Western democracies, threatening our fundamental right to privacy in unprecedented ways. The United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany—nations that pride themselves on individual liberty—have all passed legislation enabling authorities to spy on citizens with little oversight or accountability.

Last week, the UK Parliament rubber-stamped the draconian Investigatory Powers Bill, dubbed the "snooper‘s charter" by critics. This law grants British intelligence agencies and police vast powers to hack into phones and computers, intercept communications data, and bulk collect personal information—all with scant judicial oversight.

According to the Home Office, the bill will give 48 government agencies access to "internet connection records" showing the websites every citizen visits, but not the specific pages. ISPs will have to store this data on all customers for 12 months. Authorities will be able to access this data at will using a "filter" operated by the Home Office.

The Canadian government followed suit last year with the dystopian-sounding Bill C-51, which turns the Canadian Security Intelligence Service into what some have called a "secret police" force operating with little restraint. The law allows CSIS to "disrupt" potential security threats in complete secrecy with no obligation to reveal its activities to the public. As Privacy International explains, "Bill C-51 further empowers CSIS to conduct any operation it thinks is in the interest of protecting national security, including operations that contravene Canadian law or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms."

Not to be outdone, Germany‘s interior ministry recently drafted a bill to dramatically expand state hacking and allow law enforcement to remotely monitor and even manipulate data on personal devices. Most perniciously, it eliminates requirements to notify surveillance targets after the fact. Germans may never know they were spied on.

Let that sink in for a moment. The country that until recently was split in two by the Berlin Wall, with the Stasi monitoring and repressing East Germans, is now moving to embrace mass surveillance of its own citizens. If Germany, with its unique historical reasons to safeguard privacy, is willing to go down this Orwellian path, any country could be next.

Eroding the Foundation of the Digital Economy

As a software developer, these trends are especially concerning to me. The technology industry is built on a foundation of privacy—without it, digital innovation withers. Imagine how the early developers of PGP encryption or BitTorrent might have been treated under an oppressive surveillance regime. So much of the incredible progress in computing over the past few decades, from secure e-commerce to trustworthy cloud storage to online free speech platforms, would not have been possible without privacy protections that gave programmers a "safe space" to experiment.

Lack of privacy doesn‘t just undermine individual rights—it threatens the beating heart of the tech economy. Developers need to be able to freely exchange ideas, tinker, and collaborate without worrying about government monitors looking over their shoulders. As a 2014 Pew Research study found, for every 1% increase in fear of government surveillance, there is a corresponding 0.5% decrease in Google searches. Imagine how much that chilling effect is costing in lost productivity and innovation by software engineers every day.

Look no further than the open source software community for a glimpse of how privacy fuels digital creativity. So many of the tools and platforms we now take for granted, from Linux to Android to Bitcoin, were born out of an ethos of openness, transparency, and freedom from censorship. The decentralized model of open source development, where anyone can contribute code and build upon the work of others, is only possible when people have the right to share ideas without fear of surveillance or reprisal.

Pervasive spying of the kind enabled by this new crop of laws threatens to undermine the collaborative ecosystem that has been the engine of the digital revolution. If developers suspect their work is being intercepted and pored over by authorities, they‘ll hesitate to participate in public coding projects. That invisible tax on innovation is something none of us can afford.

Cryptography as Dissent

The good news is that we already have the most powerful tools imaginable to protect our privacy in the digital age: strong encryption and secure open source technologies. Encryption has long been the bane of snoopers everywhere, and it‘s only gotten more robust over time. Using free programs like GPG for email, OTR for instant messaging, and full-disk solutions like VeraCrypt, we can render our data unreadable to any outside party.

But encryption is only effective if it‘s widely implemented and relatively painless for the average user. That‘s why we need developers now more than ever to make privacy the default, not an afterthought, when designing applications. Wherever possible, encryption should be enabled out of the box, with no complicated set-up required. Services like SpiderOak, Tresorit, and ProtonMail are leading the way by offering user-friendly "end-to-end" encryption, ensuring providers themselves can‘t access customer data.

More projects should follow the lead of Let‘s Encrypt in democratizing access to encryption. In 2016, the Let‘s Encrypt Certificate Authority issued over 27 million free SSL certificates, making it radically simpler for websites to enable HTTPS by default. Ubiquitous encryption raises the cost of dragnet surveillance to the point where it‘s impractical for authorities to scoop up data en masse. As NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden put it, "we can make surveillance expensive again."

Time for Tech to Step Up

But encryption alone is not enough—not as long as technologists treat privacy as an abstract problem to be solved with code, rather than a moral imperative to be fought for tooth-and-nail. From pioneers like Phil Zimmermann, who released PGP for free in 1991 in defiance of government threats, to modern-day champions like Moxie Marlinspike, who has devoted his career to making unbreakable end-to-end encryption accessible to everyone with Signal, we need developers to be at the vanguard of the privacy resistance.

Apple‘s battle with the FBI in 2016 over unlocking the San Bernardino shooter‘s iPhone showed what‘s possible when a tech giant takes a principled stand against surveillance overreach. We need to see more of that defiant energy from companies that have too often been complicit in violating user privacy. No more cozy back-room data sharing deals with the NSA. No more crypto backdoors for authorities. No more handing over user information without a fight.

Developers at every level, from startup founders to corporate engineers to solo open source contributors, have to commit to treating privacy as a core value, not a PR talking point. That means making ethical design choices about how we collect, store, and monetize user data. It means pushing back against company policies that prioritize "frictionless sharing" over protecting sensitive information. And it means being willing to go to court to challenge unconstitutional spying in the post-Snowden age.

We may never be able to stop power-hungry politicians and overzealous spooks from trying to undermine our privacy. But we can render their efforts largely futile if enough of us use our skills to build a more secure Internet. The war on privacy is really a war of attrition—and creating usable, reliable, rock-solid encryption tools is how we win.

The Privacy Resistance Needs You

So here‘s my call to arms for every developer, engineer, and technologist who cares about protecting privacy in the digital age:

1. Make encryption the default, not an option. The more data and communication is encrypted end-to-end, the less authorities are able to engage in bulk surveillance. Whenever possible, turn on encryption by default in products.

2. Harden your systems against infiltration and hacking by keeping software up-to-date, enabling two-factor authentication, and following other security best practices. Every vulnerability is a potential surveillance backdoor.

3. Refuse to build malicious features that undermine user privacy, like crypto backdoors for law enforcement. Take a stand and be prepared to blow the whistle if your employer tries to sell out users.

4. Support privacy-enhancing open source projects with your time, money, and expertise. From Tor to Tails to Signal, these tools are the frontline defense against surveillance. Contributing to them has never been more important.

5. Advocate for strong privacy protections in industry groups, online communities, and public policy forums. Lawmakers need to hear from tech experts that security backdoors make us all less safe.

6. Educate your colleagues, friends, and family about privacy best practices like using a VPN, encrypting devices, and choosing privacy-respecting services. The more mainstream privacy becomes, the harder it is to outlaw.

7. Support organizations at the forefront of the privacy fight, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, and the ACLU. Donate, volunteer, and spread the word about their important work.

Our privacy is under assault from authorities that see it as an archaic privilege to be stripped away, rather than a fundamental right to be zealously guarded. If we sit idly by, we‘ll wake up one day soon to find we live in a dystopian panopticon beyond the wildest dreams of the Stasi. Then, like a fish pondering what water is, people will struggle to even imagine what privacy was.

Let‘s not allow that to happen on our watch. As digital custodians trusted with protecting the world‘s data and communications, we have a unique responsibility to safeguard privacy. And as the Snowden leaks showed, we can‘t count on governments or tech giants to get the job done—it‘s up to us to be the privacy heroes the Internet needs.

Will you step up and join the resistance? Our future depends on it.