UK Minister Says Encryption On Messaging Services Is Not Acceptable
As Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms continue to seemingly crackdown on the individuals who are using their platforms to promote terror propaganda, it's been pushing those individuals to embrace a new platform in order to communicate. One of the platforms they are said to be increasingly using is the Telegram messaging service.
The Telegram messaging service is an encrypted messaging app.
And the UK minister, Amber Rudd, warned this week that companies need to do more to stop terrorists from using these sorts of platforms. They are urging technology companies to cooperate with law enforcement and they are encouraged to stop offering a secret place for terrorists to communicate.
Rudd has asked for help from the owners of Facebook, WhatsApp, and others, and new legislation on the matter has also been suggested.
They don't want any sort of space online available for individuals to communicate privately.
Critics of any sort of crackdown say that it's a threat to free speech to try and interfere with encryption platforms and the privacy of individuals.
There are many reasons, not just terror, for why individuals might want to make sure that they are engaged in a truly private communication with someone else. Maybe it's a journalist speaking with a sensitive source? Perhaps it's a lawyer who needs to communicate with their client? These scenarios and others might warrant the need for encrypted communication, so that the individual can try to maintain confidentiality.
Encryption is viewed by many to be extremely important and human rights and privacy advocates affirm that it should be safeguarded. This is because there are sensitive communications (like the scenarios described above) that make people around the world vulnerable: human rights activists, lawyers, and so on.
It isn't just government agencies that can access this information either, it's hackers as well. And if valuable information isn't exchanged in a privately controlled manner, it could provide for the opportunity for individuals to be exploited over the information that's been harvested.
Should there be any human communication conducted online that isn't vulnerable to the prying eyes of the state? What do you think? share your comments below!
Pics:
pixabay
Sources:
http://ca.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idCAKBN16X0BE-OCATC
https://steemit.com/technology/@doitvoluntarily/twitter-shuts-down-over-63-000-more-accounts-for-promoting-political-or-religious-violence
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/13/whatsapp-backdoor-allows-snooping-on-encrypted-messages
They'll have to rip Signal from my cold, dead hands. Most of my friends are using Signal too. And we won't stop!
ok, dead hands it is
I'd love to see them attempt to enforce something like this.
According to the renowned linguistic scholar Noam Chomsky, the countries like America and Russia fueled the growth of Terrorists across the globe. The agencies like CIA armed, funded and groomed several terrorists group in Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. We all know the result. Now, they are talking about danger of encryption. This is ridiculous.
Right! and not just Noam, there are plenty of individuals who have eluded to this reality. One person who has done some tremendous work exposing it is journalist Ben Swann :) his 'Origins of Isis' video was great!
If you look at the case of Afghan alone, it was the hand work of Russia and America. Look at the AK47 machine guns, grenades and sophisticated rocket launchers - all these weapons of mass destruction have been supplied by Russians and Americans.
Thanks for this!
Once again using 'Terrorism' as the reason to push draconian laws on all free citizens of the UK.
Here's another idea...STOP BOMBING THE MIDDLE-EAST! You're creating an endless supply of Terrorists.
Military complex needs an endless supply of enemies. It is perfectly happy to manufacture them if they can't be found in the wild.
And about the CIA, it didn't take President Harry Truman long to realize he'd inadvertently screwed us over... https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-fenn/2015/01/28/truman-was-right-to-warn-against-cia-power
How about the Iron Mountain report for the endless supply of enemies..
I'm not familiar with that report, but a quick Wiki search suggests that there is doubt over it's legitimacy [in spite of the historical common sense premise].
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Report_from_Iron_Mountain
Awww shucks, wikipedia is saying there is doubt over it's legitimacy, better find the report and read it to draw your own conclusions ;)
http://www.stopthecrime.net/docs/Report_from_Iron_Mountain.pdf
......To the general reader, therefore, the substance of the document may be even more unsettling than its conclusions. He may not be prepared for some of its assumptions-- for instance, that most medical advances are viewed more as problems than as progress; or that poverty is necessary and desirable, public postures by politicians to the contrary notwithstanding; or that standing armies are, among other things social-welfare institutions in exactly the same sense as are old-people's homes and mental hospitals. It may strike him as odd to find the probably explanation of "flying saucer" incidents disposed of en passant in less than a sentence. He may be less surprised to find that the space program and the "controversial antimissile missile and fallout shelter programs are understood to have the spending of vast sums of money, not the advancement of science or national defense, as their principal goals, and to learn that "military" draft policies are only remotely concerned with defense.
@gaby-de-wilde
Yes, the most unsettling of logic striking giant gongs within us, first because of the confounding nature of the words but most importantly because it's simply a validation of our worst fears which deny as many want it only resonates with common sense and reinforced by logic, in each and every sentence of that despicable ethos: war is peace.
Any paragraph would do the same, any content from it's blood seeking, skin flaying, soul sucking logic would deliver subtle stabs into one's spirit:
everything is terrorism these days it seems lol
Fighting to end war is like loving to end love.
hoping to end hope?
When a government official says, "You don't really need that," that's when you know you really need it.
lol!!
nice post friend
I say meddling government "ministers" are not acceptable.
😄😇😄
Those creating the terrorist then demand our right to privacy. Jog on.
hmm.... MI6 doesn't encrypt？
They sign everything with Energetic Bear/Crouching Yeti, that is how we know they are Russian hackers.
good job @doitvoluntarily
We live in interesting times. Before data chat app was widely available and used, SMS (or Text Messaging) was (and still is in large part of the world) the dominant 'chat' technology and service. With SMS there is no end-2-end encryption, actuall there is not even encryption between the mobile handset and the SMS server in the telecoms operators network. But, every telecom operator (like Vodafone, AT&T, Optus, or whoever in the world) has the requirement to allow law enforcement to track a user and deliver all send SMS to law enforcement. You also need to know that telecom operators are not in the game of selling content to advertisers, ie they are by rules not even allowed to look into the users SMS, and most of them don't do that although they could very easily do it.
Law enforcement point I made: That is the whole debate with the end-2-end encryption of the (mostly) privately owned data chat apps of today. There is no possibility to track somebody anymore. If that is a good or bad thing, well that really depends on what you find more important:
I deliberately stated "SOME PRIVACY", since based on meta data any chat app owner can figure out a lot about the user. It knows with whom you communicate, when you do that, how often, in most of the cases also from what location etc etc. They just are not able to see the contents of it. With behaviour analyses (which is one of THE topics of research) one can get a lot of information about a user without needing to read the content of the message. Such information can then be used or sold for whatever purpose, advertising for instance, or controlling governments (knowing what each individual is doing, who are his/her friends etc). Law enforcement is only a small subset of a controlling government, and is actually a good section of the controlling government when the rules are set right (eg catching murders). Law enforcement is better served with the ability to read the contents, advertisers don't really need to know.
So why making the world very very difficult, whilst the goal of the advertisers or controlling governments are still achieved without breaking the end-2-end encryption?