An interesting article on the BBC website, “Why US tech giants are threatening to quit the UK”, questions the seriousness of US companies such as Meta or Signal that have threatened to leave the UK market if the Online Safety Bill is passed this fall. The Conservative government’s legislative package would require companies offering products with end-to-end encryption to provide a way to decrypt them if legally required to do so.
This is not a new issue: four years ago, at a meeting of the group of countries known as Five Eyes (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), ministers expressed concerns about the growth of WhatsApp as an encrypted communication tool and there was talk of “making sure that our legal system and our security and intelligence agencies can get legal and exceptional access to the information they need”, a possibility that has also been expressed in meetings of the European Union and that seems to have the support of current rotating president Spain.
The companies that manage these services are totally opposed to this type of legislation, and both Meta and Signal, as well as Apple, have made clear their refusal to build in any type of backdoor in their products. In the case of the British Online Safety Bill, both companies have openly spoken of the possibility of leaving the UK market if they are forced to weaken their encryption, which leads, now that the law seems to be approaching, to the question of whether they will actually do so.
Let’s be clear about what’s going on here: trying to ban end-to-end encryption is a waste of time and companies will abandon markets where governments step in. All that will happen is that new communication tools in open source format capable of providing it will spring up. In short, the question comes down to whether our governments really want to snoop on the bad guys or snoop on everybody: if the authorities try to justify spying on us all so they can catch the bad guys, all that will happen is that the bad guys will find other ways to talk to each other, and the rest of us will find ourselves living in a latter-day East Germany.
That Western democracies really want to go down this road is extremely worrying, and is largely the result of politicians legislating on issues they do not understand and thinking that these kinds of alarmist measures have public support. The problem is that anybody with a minimal understanding of how the technology works knows that it is simply impossible to prevent end-to-end encryption; what’s more, there is no better way of exposing a government that is engaging in performative politics: symbolic gestures that serve no purpose, or make matters worse.
Let’s hope that the people we elect to look after our interests have enough sense to listen to the experts and understand that no matter how much they legislate, there are some things beyond their control.
(En español, aquí)
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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