UK Home Secretary Uses Idea of Keeping Children Safe as a Justification To Demand Ban on Private Messaging

It would be extremely refreshing to hear a government official in the UK, or in a number of other countries, make a, “think of the encryption” plea – which would show they understand the very fundamentals of a safe and privacy-preserving internet. But instead, we are getting more and more “think of the children” platitudes – as always, designed not to actually do that, but mask other, controversial and unpopular policies. This time, it is UK’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman who claims that her opposition to Facebook’s slow-moving, alleged attempt to make a number of its products safe via implementing end-to-end encryption has to do with fears that children might get abused online. Any tech-literate person would present the big picture, and argue quite the opposite, but Braverman is either not one of those, or elects to pretend not to be, in order to serve a policy that is staunchly anti-encryption, for a whole different reason – summed up, that technology stands severely annoyingly, no doubt, in the way of governments’ wholesale mass surveillance of everybody on the internet. And what better place to twist the narrative about fears of awful things like child grooming and sexual abuse – perversely juxtaposed with actually improving internet security, i.e., encryption – than a get-together of the (in)famous “Five Eyes,” held in one eager member – New Zealand. Braverman made an effort to write to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and, ignoring the reality of what an internet without encryption would turn into, tried,…UK Home Secretary Uses Idea of Keeping Children Safe as a Justification To Demand Ban on Private Messaging