- Jul 27, 2015
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An alliance of national intelligence partners known as the Five Eyes – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US – is demanding encryption backdoors in apps such as Facebook’s WhatsApp.
As reported by the Telegraph on Wednesday, the UK’s new Home Secretary, Priti Patel, accused Facebook of helping out child abusers, drug traffickers and terrorists plotting attacks with its plans to help them hide messages behind the end-to-end encryption it plans to spread across all of its messaging services. In March, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced what he framed as a major, more privacy-focused strategy shift, with end-to-end encryption being a key component. He said at the time that the company would develop a highly secure private communications platform based on Facebook’s Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp services. The prospect is unanimously seen as bad news by the Five Eyes nations.
Patel’s warnings come on the heels of a two-day Five Eyes meeting she hosted in London along with Geoffrey Cox, the UK’s Attorney General. In attendance were security and law enforcement officials from the Five Eyes nations who said that they were worried about high-tech companies moving to “deliberately design their systems in a way that precludes any form of access to content, even in cases of the most serious crimes.” In a communique that reportedly came out of the meeting, the Five Eyes nations called for backdoors: Tech companies should include mechanisms in the design of their encrypted products and services whereby governments, acting with appropriate legal authority, can obtain access to data in a readable and usable format.
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