I went up to Blackfriars to techUK’s offices to listen to their Digital Question time. They had arranged for Vaizey, Onawurah and Huppert to speak. I covered the event using storify, which I moved here, after storify terminated their service.

I originally said on this blog that they covered privacy, access and inclusion, start-ups, brexit (briefly) and government IT. Computer Weekly have hosted a video here…, if you want the complete story. The Guardian ran a story, “Vaizey calls for tech firms to ‘meet politicians halfway’ over encryption” and sub-titled, “Debate needs to be constructive, says culture and digital economy minister after David Cameron’s controversial comments”. As Tim Fenton and John Stewart would say, two things here, firstly it’s a shame that the whole debate is focused through the lens of the debate about adult filters and secondly it’s not easy to compromise. There’s no privacy and no trust without encryption. It can’t work if the police have back doors and even today, using Vaizey’s example of the adult filters, it’s not just porn, critically it has to filter the knowledge to circumvent the filters also. If we criminalise the knowledge, we criminalise the expertise; civil IT security researchers and engineers will leave the UK. How do we build the digital economy without them? How do we compromise on that?

ooOOOoo

Backdated to the date that Computer Weekly posted their videos

Digital Question Time
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