The British government has said its security services must have access to encrypted messaging applications such as WhatsApp to prevent violent crimes.<\/p>\n
UK media reports have suggested that the man behind an attack in London last week sent an encrypted<\/p>\n
WhatsApp message moments before killing four people by ploughing his car into pedestrians and fatally stabbing a policeman.<\/p>\n
Home Secretary Amber Rudd said on Sunday it was “completely unacceptable” that police and security services had not been able to crack the heavily encrypted service.<\/p>\n
“You can’t have a situation where you have terrorists talking to each other – where this terrorist sent a WhatsApp message – and it can’t be accessed,” she told SkyNews.<\/p>\n
Police said on Saturday that they still do not know why Khalid Masood, 52, had carried out the attack and said it was likely that he acted alone, despite a claim by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.<\/p>\n
In a separate interview with the BBC, Rudd said end-to-end encryption was vital to cyber security to ensure that business, banking and other transactions were safe – but said it must also be accessible.<\/p>\n
“It’s not incompatible. You can have a system whereby they can build it so that we can have access to it when it is absolutely necessary.”<\/p>\n
Rudd said she did not yet intend to force the industry’s hand with new legislation, but would meet key players on Thursday to discuss this issue.<\/p>\n
Al Jazeera’s technology correspondent, Tarek Bazley, said he expects tech companies to resist efforts by governments around the world to look into communication of private individuals.<\/p>\n
“I do not think they will receive it at all well,” he said.<\/p>\n
“The push in recent years has been towards privacy and security. For these tech companies to change their position on the basis of a single British politician and her view, after a single event like this we have seen in London, I think that is unlikely.”<\/p>\n
What Rudd is proposing, a “backdoor way” of accessing messages that could be administered through a court order, would be “open to abuse and potential hackers”, Bazley said.<\/p>\n
“And that would make a mockery of the whole notion of security.”<\/p>\n
Brian Paddick, a home affairs spokesman for the opposition Liberal Democrats and former deputy assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan Police, said the security services could view “the content of suspected terrorists’ encrypted messages”.<\/p>\n
“The real question is, could lives have been saved in London last week if end-to-end encryption had been banned? All the evidence suggests that the answer is no.”<\/p>\n
There may be difficulties in taking on technology companies such as Facebook-owned WhatsApp.<\/p>\n
According to technology magazine Wired, end-to-end encryption means messages can only be decoded by the sender and recipient and not by anyone in between, including the company providing the service.<\/p>\n
In the United States, where WhatsApp is based, officials have been trying to make US technology firms provide a way around encryption, talks that have intensified since a mass shooting in San Bernardino in December of 2015.<\/p>\n
Last year, US authorities also fought a legal battle with tech giant Apple to get it to unlock a smartphone used by the perpetrator of San Bernardino attack.<\/p>\n
The FBI’s own experts ended up breaking into the device.<\/p>\n
Al Jazeera<\/a><\/p>\n The British government has said its security services must have access to encrypted messaging applications such as WhatsApp to prevent violent crimes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341004,"featured_media":168223,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[6298,2594],"class_list":["post-204304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-encryption","tag-whatsapp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204304"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204306,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204304\/revisions\/204306"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Now read:\u00a0Protecting web users\u2019 privacy<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"