Donald Trump will be the new President of the United States, and whether you like it or not: he will be in charge of this great nation for at least 4 years. The lack of any political experience and the incoherence of many of Trump’s statements during – or even before – the campaign make America’s next presidency unpredictable. What can the world expect from Trump’s presidency regarding such troubled topics as online privacy and internet freedom, now that he’ll be leading the NSA, known as the greatest surveillance organization in the world?
Many statements made by the future President made the world wonder about his position on online surveillance and security. One time he stated: “Edward Snowden has caused us tremendous problems”, since the leaked information resulted in a disadvantage for the U.S. when it comes to the race with China for instance, and made hackers search for Obama’s birth records to prove the former president was not an American citizen at all. In addition, Trump is a clear supporter of cyber security as he stated that: “(…) we’re so obsolete in cyber (…) we just seem to be toyed with by so many different countries, already. And we don’t know who’s doing what. We don’t know who’s got the power, who’s got that capability. (…) certainly cyber has to be very strongly in our thought process”.
In addition, Donald Trump seems to be willing to restrict parts of the internet, as a preventive move towards possible future terrorist acts. “We’re not talking about closing the Internet (…)” but “(…) about parts of Syria, parts of Iraq. Where ISIS is.” – quite the challenging task if you ask us. In addition, the 45th President of the U.S. also stated that the best move would be “getting our smartest and getting our best to infiltrate their internet”.
This is without doubt the central idea. We can only wonder about the future based on Trump’s past statements, but we can perhaps conclude that the next President of the United States will have more of a pro-surveillance approach, even if that means sacrificing some privacy. Let’s not forget that Trump stated before, that he supports “legislation which allows the NSA to hold the bulk metadata”. Furthermore, the President added that he would propose that “(…) a court, which is available any time on any day, is created to issue individual rulings on when this metadata can be accessed”.
Regardless of the doubts that remain, one thing is certain, the fully encrypted Swiss-based ProtonMail, and European messaging app Telegram – that also offers end-to-end encryption -, welcomed incredible numbers of new users within the days following the elections.
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