Science & Tech Quote by Dorothy Denning

Anxiety is doing a lot of quiet work here. Denning isn’t railing against encryption; she’s marking the moment it stops being a niche tool for spies and technologists and becomes the default setting of everyday life. The line “strong encryption becomes commonplace” frames security as a social phase change: once everyone has it, the rules of investigation, governance, and even corporate data access shift overnight.

Her phrasing is bureaucratically neutral, but the subtext is clear: encryption is not just a technical upgrade, it’s a redistribution of power. When communications and stored data are locked by design, institutions accustomed to visibility - law enforcement, intelligence agencies, regulators, even employers - lose a familiar advantage. “Concern” functions as a policy signal, inviting the audience to think about mitigation (read: access mechanisms, key escrow, exceptional access) without naming the political fight directly.

Context matters. Denning’s career sits at the intersection of computer security and public policy, and this quote echoes the 1990s-into-2000s “Crypto Wars,” when governments worried that ubiquitous cryptography would create “going dark” zones. The rhetorical move is predictive rather than moralistic: she doesn’t argue encryption is good or bad, she argues it’s inevitable - “expected to change rapidly” - which pressures policymakers to act before the default hardens.

What makes it persuasive is the temporal framing. By contrasting “right now” with the near future, Denning turns an abstract debate into a countdown, implying that delay isn’t neutrality; it’s a decision to accept a world where privacy and secrecy are cheap, scalable, and largely outside institutional reach.