Five Eyes Campaign Against Encryption Threatens Democracy

Mallory Knodel is Chief Technology Officer at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). Udbhav Tiwari is the Head of Global Product Policy at Mozilla. Shutterstock At the end of July, UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman, along with her Five Eyes surveillance colleagues, launched a campaign of opposition to Meta’s recent proposal to encrypt messages sent through its Messenger product. The Home Secretary’s comments mirror statements made by intelligence and law enforcement officials for years: Simply let down your encryption defenses and we will protect you. This campaign also lends support to recent anti-encryption legislative activity around the world. Braverman’s remarks may sound familiar, because they echo a nearly identical statement that Five Eyes made in October of 2020. The Global Encryption Coalition has over 300 members distributed across every region of the world that promote and defend encryption in key countries and multilateral fora where it is under threat. We also support efforts by companies to offer encrypted services to their users. So we remember the 2020 statement, and the ones before that, going all the way back to the 1990’s. We called Five Eyes out on their weak arguments then, and we do so now to put their newest anti-encryption campaign and accompanying legislation in the context of the Five Eyes spying apparatus. When viewed in this context, it is even more clear that the pretext of online safety, abuse reduction, or any of the other concerns raised by policymakers simply cannot justify weakening encryption through the policy…Five Eyes Campaign Against Encryption Threatens Democracy