WhatsApp Again Affirms It Will Not Break Encryption To Appease Government Entities
The debate over end-to-end encryption continues in the UK. It's really not much of a debate, though. government officials continue to claim the only way to prevent the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is by breaking or removing encryption. Companies providing encrypted communications have repeatedly pointed out the obvious: encryption protects all users, even if it makes it more difficult to detect illicit activity by certain users. It's impossible to break encryption to detect criminal activity without breaking it for every innocent user as well.
Sometimes the UK government argues with itself. The Information Commissioner's Office put out a report earlier this year that stated encryption was essential to children's online safety, directly contradicting assertions by other UK government entities which claimed breaking encryption was the only way to protect children.
At the center of this debate is WhatsApp, the popular messaging service that has provided end-to-end encrypted messaging since early 2016. And since that point, multiple governments have tried to get WhatsApp to ditch encryption or, at the very least, provide them with backdoors. That includes the UK government, which made its request only a few months after WhatsApp finished rolling out its end-to-end encryption.
WhatApp rejected the UK government's request in 2017. That hasn't stopped the UK government from repeatedly approaching the company in hopes of talking it out of its encryption. And nothing has changed for WhatsApp, which has again made it clear it's not interested in compromising user security on a country-by-country basis.
Will Cathcart, who has been at parent company Meta for more than 12 years and head of WhatsApp since 2019, told the BBC that the popular communications service wouldn't downgrade or bypass its end-to-end encryption (EE2E) just for British snoops, saying it would be foolish" to do so and that WhatsApp needs to offer a consistent set of standards around the globe.
If we had to lower security for the world, to accommodate the requirement in one country, that ... would be very foolish for us to accept, making our product less desirable to 98 percent of our users because of the requirements from 2 percent," Cathcart told the broadcaster. What's being proposed is that we - either directly or indirectly through software - read everyone's messages. I don't think people want that."
It's good to see WhatsApp take this stand (again), even as the voices clamoring for the end of encryption are now claiming its primary purpose is to allow distributors of CSAM to escape justice. It's pretty tough to take a principled stand when opponents are accusing you of siding with child molesters.
And the pressure isn't going to let up. The UK government still believes it is entitled to encryption backdoors. The European Union, which the UK recently exited, has expressed the same desire for broken encryption, using the same disingenuous phrase trotted out so often by the likes of FBI Director Chris Wray: lawful access."
But simple refusals like these allow companies to call governments' bluffs. If governments can't get the backdoors they want, they'll have to decide whether they want their citizens to have access to encrypted communications. And while it may seem some governments don't want their citizens to enjoy this protection, very few have been willing to eject popular services that won't comply with their demands.