Home Secretary Amber Rudd yesterday met with technology giants including Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google to discuss how the firms investigate, regulate and remove extremist content and propaganda hosted on their platforms.
During a disastrous tour of Sunday morning politics programmes last week, Rudd told Andrew Marr British intelligence services should be able to break the encryption of services such as messaging app WhatsApp as “there should be no place for terrorists to hide”. “We don’t want to go into the cloud”, she iterated, but wanted the people who “understand the necessary hashtags to stop this stuff even being put up”.
Setting aside Rudd’s shaky grasp of tech terminology (the cloud is a network of servers, not a quagmire, and she appears to have conflated hashtags with cryptography’s hashing), she appears to know frighteningly little about what these companies actually do.
Picking a fight with tech companies is not a smart move. Critics have argued the majority of powerful figures behind Google, Apple, WhatsApp et al who champion consumer privacy are either die-hard liberals or hail from countries where state surveillance is the norm (WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum is from the Ukraine, while Google co-founder Sergey Brin was born in Russia). But the issue lies within the individuals spreading hate, rather than the means by which they spread it.
Jack Dorsey on encryption: Tech companies are ‘definitely not above the law’
Yesterday’s meeting is the latest in a long line of instances in which the government has tried to make an example of the tech giants: from extremism to fake news. MPs seem happy to try and blame tech for facilitating conversations and hosting unsavoury content, but less reluctant to acknowledge their own failures in addressing or combatting the deep social unrest tearing through the UK which births would-be terrorists, racists, paedophiles or liars.
Yes, Rudd wants to prevent terrorism, as do the vast majority of people in this world. Breaking encryption merely giftwraps a tool for terrorists to exploit. The bad guys in this equation have far superior hacking power to our government – powerful enough, if you believe certain headlines, to sway entire elections. If you break encryption for a government, you break it for everyone. Likewise with extremist content and hate speech. It’s all very well to work yourselves up in a flap about the tech platforms not doing enough to combat hate, but it’s not as if years of austerity, political misguidance and economic meltdown have exactly helped.
