Americans are going to be so ubiquitously surveilled if the government bans encryption that they will eventually welcome its return, said tech executive Mark Cuban.
“Surveillance is getting easier,” Cuban told the Washington Examiner, and new technologies are rapidly “opening new means of surveillance.” He added that while encryption might sometimes be helpful to bad actors, it also protects law-abiding Americans.
“Any tool that can be used to protect our liberty and freedom from oppression can be used by bad actors. There are far better ways to offset … risk than trying to crack encryption,” he said. “Social hacking is a vulnerability for every encrypted communications system.”
The issue of encryption and the ability of terrorists to “go dark” has been in the news since a federal judge this week ordered Apple to assist the Federal Bureau of Investigation in trying to break open an iPhone used by the one of the perpetrators in the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif.
“Encryption is open source. You can’t ever put it back in the bag,” Cuban said. And if Americans do try to turn back the clock, “There will be sensors and cameras and drones watching us in so many ways every day that citizens will welcome back encryption as a way to protect our privacy.”
Cuban, who became a billionaire as an innovator in the tech industry, has also funded several startups. That includes a messaging application called “Cyber Dust,” one of just a handful that allows users to send messages using end-to-end encryption.
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He has also occasionally waded into politics. In September, the Mavericks owner allowed Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump to use his stadium in Dallas to hold a campaign rally, and in a recent radio interview, he suggested he would be open to serving as vice president if Trump asked him, saying, “As long as he said he’d listen to me in everything I said, we’d be OK.”
