Following William's Hague's column in the Telegraph earlier last week, in which he spoke in favour of bulk data collection and against encryption, Lee Munson, researcher at Comparitech.com reacts:
"Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hague?
"If you believe cracking encryption will aid law enforcement tackle terrorism you are sadly deluded.
"You see, no serious terrorist in this day and age will give a jot about crypto as they plan their next atrocity. They’ll buy ‘burner’ phones instead and promptly toss them away when the deed is done.
"And no hardware manufacturer is likely to have been so clumsy that you can break their encryption anyway.
"So if you want the means to pry into the devices of the innocent you’re going to have to rely on ‘The Snooper’s Charter,’ in combination with those gagging orders, in order to get tech firms to compromise their own software with backdoors and other ill-thought out custom software.
"And when they do, don’t expect to catch too many bad guys."