On the 26th March 2017 the UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd, joined Andrew Marr for an interview on his BBC show. During this 15 minute interview, speaking mainly on immigration in the wake of Brexit, was a 3 minute discussion on WhatsApp encryption whereby Rudd made comments such as:
“It used to be that people would steam open envelopes or just listen in on phones when they wanted to find out what people were doing, legally, through warrantry,”
“But on this situation we need to make sure that our intelligence services have the ability to get into situations like encrypted WhatsApp.”
“You can have a system whereby they can build it so we can have access to it when it is absolutely necessary. We can’t have a situation where terrorists can talk to each other,”
You can view the 3 minute video segment on Andrew Marr’s Twitter page.
As you can imagine there has been a widespread backlash to Amber Rudd’s comments as the UK Conservative party are clearly confused by what really is required of tech companies to facilitate a backdoor or “golden-key”. Every online news provider seems to want a piece of this story, some highlights below:
- The Financial Times wrote an interesting article on the event, arguing that if she hadn’t of lost her audience with the lack of technical knowledge, would she have been able to convince people of the “privileged techno-elitists who babble about encryption and digital rights while making money from allowing violent criminals to use their technology”.
- Mashable takes the standpoint that snooping eyes could just as easily belong to cyber criminals as to government officials, a big concern for activists around the world protesting agains oppressive regimes.
- Bill Conner, the CEO of SonicWall, gave an interview to Computer Business Review which seems to sum up the issue clearly; “Encryption is available worldwide – you pick on WhatsApp, but you think that is going to stop bad guys from using it? There’s tens of thousands of different email peer-to-peer encryptions that they can use, so trying to regulate the good people that are using it versus bad guys are going to find it anyway, what are you really doing?”
On the 30th March, Rudd had a meeting with Microsoft, Google, Twitter and Facebook to discuss how they can tackle terrorist propaganda on their social media sites.
The Register and Computer Business Review summarise the meeting succinctly, outlining the letter written by the companies stating they will tackle the issue in three ways:
- Improve automatic tools to remove extremist content.
- Help other companies to do the same.
- Support efforts from “civil society organizations” to “promote alternative and counter-narratives.”
Wired called the meeting ‘lame’ and said there was “no mention of Rudd’s controversial and ill-informed comments about introducing a surveillance backdoor into end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp and other similar services.”
Finally, The Guardian‘s take sums it up quite nicely; judging the situation as one of a mass PR stunt. They highlight the close relationship of the tech-giants and members of our government, arguing that there is no time to create a bill that limits hate-speech on social media without limiting the press.
“So the tech companies get called in for their ritual berating, hang their heads and say they’re sorry. The government gets to say it’s tough, without losing its powerful friends. And the whole thing goes on as it was before.”
Zoe Mackenzie 