Another example of what the Liberal Democrats are for

In the House of Lords on Tuesday, Lord Roberts of Llandudno urged legislators not to damage free speech as part of the fight against terrorism.

[Later] Regarding Cameron and May's desire to break into encrypted communications, Peter Higgins, a member in Colchester, posted on Facebook:

I am a mathematician and I teach a University course in cryptography, although this is not my research field. However, all parties need to talk to real experts before they sound off about banning encryption. (The PM is obviously clueless and has no scientific advice.) It would be possible to try to stop the general public having access to encryption that is virtually unbreakable. Public Key Cryptosystems, used in online banking for example, even if you are unaware of it, are designed to be very strong but not absolutely impregnable. The trouble is, it is not that hard to produce unbreakable ciphers. If the toughest ones were taken off the market, a black market would appear pretty well overnight as the knowledge of how to produce practically unbreakable ciphers is in the public domain.

Julian Huppert said very much the same thing in the House on Monday.