{"id":12692,"date":"2023-09-07T09:59:30","date_gmt":"2023-09-07T09:59:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/startups\/britain-admits-defeat-in-controversial-fight-to-break-encryption\/"},"modified":"2023-09-07T09:59:31","modified_gmt":"2023-09-07T09:59:31","slug":"britain-admits-defeat-in-controversial-fight-to-break-encryption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/?p=12692","title":{"rendered":"Britain Admits Defeat in Controversial Fight to Break Encryption"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p><span class=\"lead-in-text-callout\">Tech companies and<\/span> privacy activists are claiming victory after an eleventh-hour concession by the British government in a long-running battle over end-to-end encryption.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">The so-called \u201cspy clause\u201d in the UK\u2019s Online Safety Bill, which experts argued would have made end-to-end encryption all but impossible in the country, will no longer be enforced after the government admitted the technology to securely scan encrypted messages for signs of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, without compromising users\u2019 privacy, doesn\u2019t yet exist. Secure messaging services, including WhatsApp and Signal, had threatened to pull out of the UK if the bill was passed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">\u201cIt\u2019s absolutely a victory,\u201d says Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, which operates the Signal messaging service. Whittaker has been a staunch opponent of the bill, and has been meeting with activists and lobbying for the legislation to be changed. \u201cIt commits to not using broken tech or broken techniques to undermine end-to-end encryption.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">The UK\u2019s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">The UK government hadn\u2019t specified the technology that platforms should use to identify CSAM being sent on encrypted services, but the most commonly-cited solution was something called client-side scanning. On services that use end-to-end encryption, only the sender and recipient of a message can see its content; even the service provider can\u2019t access the unencrypted data.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Client-side scanning would mean examining the content of the message before it was sent\u2014that is, on the user\u2019s device\u2014and comparing it to a database of CSAM held on a server somewhere else. That, according to Alan Woodward, a visiting professor in cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, amounts to \u201cgovernment-sanctioned spyware scanning your images and possibly your [texts].\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">In December, Apple shelved its plans to build client-side scanning technology for iCloud, later saying that it couldn\u2019t make the system work without infringing on its users\u2019 privacy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Opponents of the bill say that putting backdoors into people\u2019s devices to search for CSAM images would almost certainly pave the way for wider surveillance by governments. \u201cYou make mass surveillance become almost an inevitability by putting [these tools] in their hands,\u201d Woodward says. \u201cThere will always be some \u2018exceptional circumstances\u2019 that [security forces] think of that warrants them searching for something else.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Although the UK government has said that it now won\u2019t force unproven technology on tech companies, and that it essentially won\u2019t use the powers under the bill, the controversial clauses remain within the legislation, which is still likely to pass into law. \u201cIt\u2019s not gone away, but it\u2019s a step in the right direction,\u201d Woodward says.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">James Baker, campaign manager for the Open Rights Group, a nonprofit that has campaigned against the law\u2019s passage, says that the continued existence of the powers within the law means encryption-breaking surveillance could still be introduced in the future. \u201cIt would be better if these powers were completely removed from the bill,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">But some are less positive about the apparent volte-face. \u201cNothing has changed,\u201d says Matthew Hodgson, CEO of UK-based Element, which supplies end-to-end encrypted messaging to militaries and governments. \u201cIt\u2019s only what\u2019s actually written in the bill that matters. Scanning is fundamentally incompatible with end-to-end encrypted messaging apps. Scanning bypasses the encryption in order to scan, exposing your messages to attackers. So all \u2018until it\u2019s technically feasible\u2019 means is opening the door to scanning in future rather than scanning today. It\u2019s not a change, it\u2019s kicking the can down the road.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Whittaker acknowledges that \u201cit\u2019s not enough\u201d that the law simply won\u2019t be aggressively enforced. \u201cBut it\u2019s major. We can recognize a win without claiming that this is the final victory,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">The implications of the British government backing down, even partially, will reverberate far beyond the UK, Whittaker says. Security services around the world have been pushing for measures to weaken end-to-end encryption, and there is a similar battle going on in Europe over CSAM, where the European Union commissioner in charge of home affairs, Ylva Johannson, has been pushing similar, unproven technologies.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">\u201cIt\u2019s huge in terms of arresting the type of permissive international precedent that this would set,\u201d Whittaker says. \u201cThe UK was the first jurisdiction to be pushing this kind of mass surveillance. It stops that momentum. And that\u2019s huge for the world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Read the full article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/britain-admits-defeat-online-safety-bill-encryption\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tech companies and privacy activists are claiming victory after an eleventh-hour concession by the British government in a long-running battle over end-to-end encryption. The so-called \u201cspy clause\u201d in the UK\u2019s Online Safety Bill, which experts argued would have made end-to-end encryption all but impossible in the country, will no longer be enforced after the government [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12693,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12692","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-startups"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Britain Admits Defeat in Controversial Fight to Break Encryption | Brandiary<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Tech companies and privacy activists are claiming victory after an eleventh-hour concession by the British government in a long-running 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