The fight over encrypted messaging is just beginning

Jay Sullivan, Product Management Director for Privacy and Integrity in Messenger of Facebook, Inc. testifies during a hearing before Senate Judiciary Committee December 10, 2019 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. 

Jay Sullivan, Product Management Director for Privacy and Integrity in Messenger of Facebook, Inc. testifies during a hearing before Senate Judiciary Committee December 10, 2019 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.  | Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

In October, a group of top elected officials in western democracies wrote to Facebook expressing concern about the company’s plans to incorporate end-to-end encryption in all of its messaging products. US Attorney General Bill Barr, along with his rough equivalents in the United Kingdom and Australia, wrote that encryption would make it difficult or impossible for them to uncover instances where messaging was used to facilitate terrorism, child exploitation, and other crimes. They asked Facebook to reconsider its plans.

Anyway, the company thought about it and the answer is no. Here are WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart and Messenger honcho Stan Chudnovsky (in a PDF! sorry):

Cybersecurity experts have repeatedly proven that when you weaken…

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via The Verge – All Posts

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