Your privacy is important

The UK Government wants to legislate against end-to-end-encryption (E2EE) for online communications – so law enforcement can monitor your and criminals’ online communications.

I have written about this a lot – as I think the privacy of law abiding citizens is important and law enforcement should use the current laws, due process and warrants to pursue criminals. If law enforcement can backdoor anyone’s communications, criminals will simply switch to another way of communicating that law enforcement cannot monitor and threat actors will exploit the backdoors to monitor our communications. It does not matter how secret the backdoors are – the secret will either be discovered or revealed and the threat actors will be into everyone’s messages and other compromised communications.

Further Reading

Online Safety Bill articles (Smart Thinking Solutions)

Online Safety Act publications – Parliamentary Bills – UK Parliament

Now the boss of WhatsApp has stated they would pull out of the UK, rather than supply a compromised to users:

WhatsApp would not remove end-to-end encryption for UK law, says chief | WhatsApp | The Guardian

WhatsApp recently pulled out of Iran, when its government banned E2EE, if the UK Government followed Iran and also banned E2EE, it would pull out of here as well.

The Child Protection Argument

Before I start:

We have a link at the bottom every post and page on Smart Thinking to the Government’s initiative to protect the vulnerable.

Stop Abuse Together

We also support any workable proposal to protect the vulnerable online – of which there are many in the proposed Online Safety Bill.

Wrapping child safety up in the message to ban E2EE is not justifiable, without also discussing the compromise to all law abiding citizen’s privacy and just how effective the ban would be on stopping child abuse.

I have a problem with banning E2EE. As I have stated criminals will simple switch to communications that law enforcement could not monitor. Before the internet, text messages and burner phones spies, crooks and paedophiles left coded messages in public places – they could could just go back to that.

The Online Safety Bill is still going through parliament and we are back to the question of end-to-end encryption

I know my position on this argument. You need to look at the evidence, comments by Ministers, Members of Parliament, independent industry experts and industry insiders and other reliable sources and make your own mind up.

Photo by Tim Mossholder