NewScientist (1 April 2017) notes that WhatsApp is once again under attack in the UK:
THE debate over encryption has been reignited in the UK after the home secretary, Amber Rudd, said that end-to-end encryption in apps such as WhatsApp was “completely unacceptable”.
Rudd spoke following the revelation that British extremist Khalid Masood used WhatsApp a few minutes before launching his attack on Westminster last week. But security experts say any attempt to clamp down on encryption is unworkable. “My impression was that primarily she doesn’t know what she is talking about,” says Paul Bernal at the University of East Anglia, UK.
An Encryption Formula. Source: Popular Science
If Secretary Rudd is to be entirely fair about the matter, she should also be calling for banning motor vehicles of all sorts, in view of last year’s French massacre by truck, and the more recent Swedish incident, or for that matter kitchen knives.
These are all candidates to be members of the same category, though: things that are too useful to live without. Of course, end-to-end encryption is the newest, intangible candidate to the category, and its usefulness is not as obvious as a motor vehicle.
It seems to me that the Secretary is shamefully attempting to ride a tragic incident to implement a policy without properly assessing the situation – indeed, how the WhatsApp message figures into the incident is not at all clear, at least in this very brief report.
The proper approach should be a measured estimate of the positives end-to-end encryption brings to society, and the compare that to an estimate of the negatives the same encryption can bring to society. Right now it appears to be nothing more than opportunistically pursuing the passing of a law without understanding anything at all about the realities on the ground – or in the theory.
