A leaked draft document has revealed that the UK government has been secretly vying for a ban to be placed on encryption. Its plan is to induce technology businesses to build backdoors into their products, and also to get mobile operators and internet service providers to provide real-time communications of customers to the government “in an intelligible form” within one working day, in order to enable its intelligence agencies to access civilians’ private data and messages.
Leaked by the Open Rights Group, the document details extreme new surveillance proposals, which would effectively mean that government agencies would be able to spy on one in 10,000 citizens – around 6,500 people – at any one time. The document calls on internet providers to remove encryption:
To provide and maintain the capability to disclose, where practicable, the content of communications or secondary data in an intelligible form and to remove electronic protection applied by or on behalf of the telecommunications operator to the communications or data, or to permit the person to whom the warrant is addressed to remove such electronic protection.
This would effectively mean the end of encryption, the all-important security measure employed by a whole slew of companies, including WhatsApp and major banks, as a way of protecting people’s private data private against attacks from hackers and cyber criminals.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has even gone so far as to say backdoors, built to break encryption, are “the software equivalent of cancer”.
Home Secretary Amber Rudd was front page news in March after her call to popular messaging service Whatsapp to let government agencies read its users’ encrypted messages in the aftermath of the Westminster terror attack.
Before an individual can be targeted by government agencies, approval from a judge appointed by the Prime Minister would be required, and the proposals outlined in the document would also need the approval of both Houses of Parliament before passing into law.
The controversial news follows from the Investigatory Powers Act, a highly contentious piece of legislation which was mainly pushed by PM Theresa May and signed into law last year.
