UK Prime Minister David Cameron plans to ban any online messaging platform that uses end-to-end encryption, such that it would be unreadable by the country’s intelligence services, has been deemed “inconsistent with [European Union] law”. Messaging apps that use end-to-end encryption, such as the popular WhatsApp, Apple’s iMessage, and image sharing platform Snapchat, are protected under the EU’s Article Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights. Home Secretary Teresa May, creator of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill – or ‘Snooper’s Charter’ – has, however, appealed the decision.
The ‘Snooper’s Charter’ has been met with vocal opposition from both users and tech companies alike. Apple CEO Tim Cook declared that his company has “never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services […] and we never will.”
“In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which, even in extremis, with a signed warrant from the home secretary personally, that we cannot read?” David Cameron said back in January. “Are we going to allow a means of communication where it simply isn’t possible to do that? And my answer to that question is no we must not. The first duty of any government is to keep our people and our country safe,” he added, using the age-old trick of citing terrorism prevention to infringe on civil liberties, despite the fact it doesn’t work.
Even MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip and Nazi poster boy Boris Johnson is towing the Tory Party line of not giving a damn about human rights, saying, “I’m not interested in this civil liberties stuff. If they’re a threat, I want their emails and calls listened to.”
For all its faults, the European Union is the only body standing up for privacy and human rights in the face of Owellian levels of mass surveillance. Long may that continue.
Thank you The Express for providing us with this information.
I think it should be Orwellian rather than Owellian in the last paragraph.