WhatsApp, Signal and five other messaging services have joined forces to attack the Government’s Online Safety Bill, threatening to leave the U.K. market over fears that the bill will kill end-to-end encryption and open the door to “routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages”. Matthew Lesh in the Spectator has more.
Encryption provides a defence against fraud and scams; it allows us to communicate with friends and family safely; it enables human rights activists to send incriminating information to journalists. Governments and politicians even use it to keep their secrets from malicious foreign actors (and their colleagues). Encryption should not be thrown away in a panic.
The Government has responded to these concerns by declaring that the bill “in no way represents a ban on end-to-end encryption”. This is technically true but deceptive. The bill gives Ofcom the power to require services to install tools (called “accredited technology”) that could require surveillance of encrypted communications for child exploitation and terrorism content.
Advocates claim this is possible without undermining encryption – by installing tools for scanning for certain content on a user’s device. However, just as one can’t be half pregnant, something can’t be half encrypted. Once a service starts reading messages for any purpose the entire premise of encryption disappears. A paper from fifteen computer scientists and security researchers in 2021 explained it is “moot” to talk about encryption “if the message has already been scanned for targeted content”.
With respect to child exploitation material, messages could be checked against the PhotoDNA database. But that only contains historic photos and videos and cannot be stored on devices. It means creating a software vulnerability, that could be exploited by malicious actors, and sending data back to a central database to check whether it is a match. Alternatively, companies could use machine learning to detect nudity, which would need to be reviewed by authorities. But that has a high rate of failure. Just last year, a father lost his Google account and was reported to the police after sending a naked photo of his child to a doctor.
Some contend that privacy should be sacrificed in the fight against child abuse. But there are clearly limits to this logic. Few would consent to the state putting CCTV in everyone’s bedroom to crack down on the abuse of children. But that is effectively what a technology notice could mean: a CCTV camera in everyone’s phones. Ofcom could even be able to require the use of scanning technology without independent oversight (unlike the Investigatory Powers Act, which at least requires authorities to seek permission from a tribunal and is, generally, targeted against a specific individual rather than mass surveillance).
Message scanning is open to serious mission creep. There will be enormous pressure to scan communications for other purposes, from ‘disinformation’ in the U.K. to any unsanctioned material in authoritarian countries. This is why platforms, who do not want to create a vulnerability in their product or set a global precedent for their billions of users, really could leave the relatively small U.K. market because of the bill. The shutdown of WhatsApp in particular would be a political disaster for any Government, and not just because ministers and MPs would lose their main communications platform; millions of people who use it across the country will also lose theirs.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Always starts off about the children and the children’s safety and the children’s children’s children’s future……then it escalates, the scope grows massively, and suddenly the state will arrest me for sending a friend a text with a link to a Daily Sceptic article on Rona or Climate-tardism…arresting me under the rubric ‘public safety’, ‘disinformation’, ‘selfishness’, ‘prone to Nazism’….
Message scanning is open to serious mission creep. There will be enormous pressure to scan communications for other purposes, from ‘disinformation’ in the U.K. to any unsanctioned material in authoritarian countries.
“…for child exploitation and terrorism content.”
Hmm – how many conspiracy-based terrorism attacks in the last few years? And child exploitation has been hiding in plain sight in every major city for twenty years with minimal action being taken.
The real motive is pathetically transparent to anyone who isn’t addicted to the Turkish Delight.
“Hmm – how many conspiracy-based terrorism attacks in the last few years? And child exploitation has been hiding in plain sight in every major city for twenty years with minimal action being taken.”
Exactly the point I was going to make.
Grooming gangs are rife across the country and Greater Manchester is thick with this paedophilia but Bunter Burnham shuts down every attempt to have the lid peeled off. But there is no cover up.
Whenever children are used to bolster an argument it is immediately clear that something nefarious is afoot.
“To save the children” is nowadays like shouting:
“We’re up to no good and waving a flag about it.”
And that is exactly what is going on here. The same applies to “terrorism.” Lies and BS.
I’ve no doubt that the comms between the politicians and the police chiefs/council heads are well encrypted, and will remain so whatever FOI applications are made.
I have zero confidence in OFCOM after its disgraceful and totalitarian behaviour during the illusory ‘pandemic’.
The WhatsApp threat to withdraw from Britain is timely.
The withdrawal of WhatsApp from Britain will broadcast from the rooftops the socialist fascist nature of government in this country to the entire world.
Sort of ironic that WhatsApp encrypts its messages then the moron Matt Hancock gives them all away to a journalist.
Good I hope WhatsApp carry out their threat.
Hancock was undone by his own narcissism and vanity
It always amazed me on what he has to narcissistic or vain about?
Well, I think he was an “estate agent” in the past. One of the best, honest, brokers (sarc) in the trade, perhaps.
He’s a legend in his own lunchtime
The state wants to read all our conversations in order to help children, yet the state is sanctioning paedophilia-by-proxy with the transgender cult.
What the state is worried about is people talking about all this bull***t in private and standing up against it. It’s the same reason they want to destroy the nuclear family: families put each other first. And religious families will put the church ahead of the state as well. The state wants to be a child’s mother and father, hence Scotland constantly trying to create state guardians.
WhatsApp is the tip of the iceberg of what’s going on. All this after Elon Musk discovered that private messaging on Twitter was being accessed by US intelligence services and is instigating end-to-end encryption.
I have a VPN on my phone. At this rate, that’ll be the only way to run messaging services.
Why isn’t the state allowed to pre-scan all letter and parcels for illegal content and to record all telephone conversations for the same purpose? Why is it legal to distribute printed materials without getting an official approval of the content first? And while we’re at it, why are people (again) allowed to talk to other people in private despite they could be discussing Really Evil Stuff[tm]?
Communication over the internet is just that: Communication. It’s not something especially evil and dangerous the state must thus regulate much more tightly than other communication. That it seems technically feasible to monitor all communication involving general purpose computers and the internet doesn’t justify doing it. Local authorities could as well conduct 5 – 10 random property searches per day. That’s also technically feasible and bound to catch some criminals.
Linked to encryption is the fallacy of redaction. I (and other people) were recently sent electronically electronically “redacted” documents by a Government Department, during the course of an embarrassing Select Committee Inquiry. Ostensibly, the redaction was to obliterate supposedly “personal data” relating to child abuse investigations. In reality, the redaction clearly covered up (presumably intentionally) a major blunder by that department who negligently failed to spot, or turned a blind eye, to politically-embarrassing child abuse: the “personal data” appeal was a pretext and distraction, and was used by the Select Committee as justification for not exploring deeper. As it happened, they shot themselves in the foot: no Government Department is going authorise a redaction tool that cannot be un-redacted by a suitably back-door.(“In the UK, only terrorists use unbreakable encryption.”) Sure enough, there was a backdoor to the redaction app, so what superficially appeared to be obliteration of data was in reality trivial encryption (barely more than an encoding). The document could easily be read (and was) by police (and then memory-holed, as it showed up malfeasance by the Cabinet Office).
I bet the crackable redaction tool was not an accident. Who in Government is going to authorise uncrackable encryption systems on government computers? “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way. [Franklin D. Roosevelt]”.
I once worked with a software product that allowed redaction of document images, but via an overlay of the redactions. It was hilarious on slow networks that the complete image of the document would appear on screen, followed some seconds later by the black redaction blocks.
“It’s for the children”
Once again and certainly since March 2020 (if not before) common sense, reason and logic has been thrown out of the window in favour of panic, fear and senseless stupidity. Are we ever going to learn the folly of our ways?