Rolling Stone has an article on a planned UK Campaign against end-to-end encryption. Of course, after the University of Virginia rape story debacle, everything they report should be viewed, um, critically. That said, the story is disturbing.
The Home Office has reportedly hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency to concoct what can only be termed a disingenuous advertising campaign to discredit end-to-end encryption in general and FaceBook’s plan to implement it in WhatsApp—its messaging app—in particular.
You can read the article to discover some of the stunts they have planned but the whole campaign is based on the usual Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse and especially how that nasty encryption makes it impossible to “protect the children”™.
As always in this type of action, the Home Office is pretending that it’s possible to provide a backdoor key that only the good guys can use. Virtually every cryptography expert says that’s impossible and there’s nothing in the government’s past record in protecting these types of secrets that suggests it will be any different with a backdoor key. One former government security executive described it as “the digital equivalent of alchemy”.
All governments hate end-to-end encrypted messaging apps because it allows citizens to keep their private business private and how can the nannies do their job if they can’t snoop on what you’re saying? They’ll bring up “think of the children”, drugs, terrorism and all the other boogeymen as if encryption were somehow unique in its use by criminals. I hope my cousins in the UK tell them to get lost.