Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, a major proponent of both freedom and privacy online, as evidenced by him filing a lawsuit against the NSA following the reveal of its mass surveillance program by whistleblower Edward Snowden, has declared that there is “no excuse” for not using internet encryption, whether that is providers arguing that it is cost-prohibitive, or UK Prime Minister David Cameron moaning that it makes spying on people harder.
During his keynote speech at the 2015 IP Expo Europe IT conference, Wales said, “There’s really no excuse to have any major web property that’s not secure.”
“There is a massive trend on the internet towards SSL—secure connections,” citing figures from Sandvine that show nearly 30% of internet traffic was encrypted as of April 2015, which is expected to jump to 65% by 2016. “My expectation is that this is going to narrow; over the next couple of years, [unencrypted traffic] is going to end up being a five or six percent slice,” he said, adding, “All major traffic is going to be encrypted very, very soon.”
“It is not feasible in any sense of the word for the UK to ban end-to-end encryption,” Wales added, in a swipe against David Cameron. “Not only is it not feasible, it’s a completely moronic stupid thing to do.”
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