WhatsApp, Signal and five other messaging services have joined forces to attack the government’s Online Safety Bill. They fear the bill will kill end-to-end encryption and say, in an open letter, that this could open the door to ‘routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages’. The stakes are high: WhatsApp and Signal are threatening to leave the UK market if encryption is undermined. This intervention comes as the Lords begins their line-by-line committee stage scrutiny of the Bill today.
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.
Just as one can’t be half pregnant, something can’t be half encrypted
The government has responded to these concerns by declaring that the bill ‘in no way represents a ban on end-to-end encryption’.
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