US tech firms help terrorists, says new UK spy chief. Maybe, but they also help the rest of us.

[Commentary] Robert Hannigan, the new head of British spy agency GCHQ, has attacked Silicon Valley tech firms for aiding terrorism by providing greater security for their customers in the wake of Edward Snowden’s surveillance leaks.

I see two themes here: an echoing of the FBI’s stateside efforts to get politicians to force tech firms to allow spies and cops to bypass tech firms’ newly heightened encryption efforts (he named no names, but Google’s email encryption push and Apple’s device encryption moves spring to mind); and a bolstering of the UK government’s desire to block extremist online material.

It cannot be said often enough that it’s impossible to clamp down on terrorist uses of technology without clamping down on the freedoms of everyone else. One more time: If you intentionally break the digital locks that we all use, we are all made less, not more, safe. It is absurd and incorrect to think that you can insert a backdoor -- a flaw in security -- and expect it to be exploitable by only one entity. If we all have broken locks, we are all more vulnerable not only to foreign intelligence agencies, but also to non-state hackers.