Governments in the UK, US
and Australia have asked Facebook, in an open letter, to roll back plans
to bring end-to-end encryption to all of its platforms.
Facebook, rocked by privacy scandals, responds
that everyone has the right to a private conversation.
Home Secretary Priti Patel co-signed an open letter to Facebook
It is the latest in an age-old battle between privacy and safety,
which has played out between governments and tech firms ever since digital
communication became mass market.
What is end-to-end encryption?
As the name suggests, this is a secure way of sending information
so that only the intended receiver can read it.
The information is encrypted while it is still on the sender's
device and is only decrypted when it reaches the person intended. Nobody, not
even the platform owner, has the keys to unlock it.
It was introduced partly as a response to National Security Agency
whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations that the intelligence services in
the UK and US had many ways to intercept communication and were doing so on a
mass scale.
Why has this become an issue now?
The UK and the US have just signed an historic agreement to give
each other a much faster way of getting hold of private conversations - cutting
down the process time from months or years, to weeks or days.
But that agreement could potentially be rendered a bit useless, if
they cannot read the scrambled messages.
Is there evidence encryption has hampered police
enquiries?
When the BBC asked the Home Office to provide examples, it could
not do so.
The real issue is the fact that Facebook will no longer be able to
police its own content, it said.
It pointed to the fact that last year Facebook sent 12 million
reports of child exploitation or abuse to the US's National Center for Missing
and Exploited Children, and it would no longer be able to do this if it had
encryption on all its platforms.
It is something that Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg addressed
directly in a Q&A with staff about the issue.
"When we decided to go to end-to-end encryption across the
different apps, this is one of the things that just weighed the most heavily on
me," he said.
"There is more stuff on basically being able to identify
patterns of activity, especially around sharing child pornography, and things
like this that are just terrible, that I think you can probably find through
patterns of activity and that we are going to ramp up investment of," he
added.
He was keen to point out that the fact there was so much child
abuse imagery reported via Facebook did not indicate that Messenger, the name
of Facebook's direct messaging service, was the preferred platform for it, more
that Facebook had become very good at finding it and sending it on.
Would it be easy for Facebook to give police a
backdoor?
"A backdoor is rather like leaving a key under the mat - once
someone knows it is there anyone can walk in," said Prof Alan Woodward, a
security expert at the University of Surrey and a consultant to Europol.
His words were echoed by human rights pressure group Amnesty
International in its response.
"Proposals for a 'backdoor' have repeatedly been shown to be
unworkable. There is no middle ground: if law enforcement is allowed to
circumvent encryption, then anybody can," it said.
Governments could also ask the social network to change the
technical architecture of its platforms so messages could be decrypted when
they reached the server. But that would signal a return to days of mass
surveillance, thinks Prof Woodward.
"It's exactly what we had before Snowden's revelations and
the reaction of the service providers was to introduce end-to-end encryption
such that they could not disclose either the key or the decrypted message even
if compelled to by law. The laws of mathematics currently trump the law of the
land."
And, of course, there is good old-fashioned policing - if the
police request data from WhatsApp, they do get IP addresses, phone numbers and
contact lists which could be useful in piecing together evidence, even without
the full messages.
Source: MyJoyOnline.com
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