Parliament and the nation have been told numerous times in recent years about the dangers of end-to-end encryption. It is a friend to terrorists. A help to paedophiles. A threat to public safety and national security. Both main parties appear to agree on the nature and severity of the threat, and Parliament has now legislated to create powers to disrupt it in the new Online Safety Act.
Given these dangers, and the cross-party consensus, it is surely a mystery why ruthless tech firms keep embedding end-to-end encryption in their services on their way to becoming commercial giants, and why existing giants like Facebook are adding the feature as default for all users in the course of this year.
Where can we find an answer to the conundrum of something so perilous being rolled out, rather than shunned as a reprehensible, even rogue, technology?
I have a few ideas. A good place to start would be on the mobile phones of Westminster and Whitehall.
In fact, let’s be more specific and try the phones of the very ministers, shadow ministers and MPs who denounce end-to-end encryption in the Commons and on the airwaves, the special advisers who draft their lines to take, and the officials who develop the policies and legislation to put those denunciations into action.
I guarantee you that each and every one uses end-to-end encryption in their working and personal lives. Most likely they use WhatsApp as standard, but potentially Telegram and Signal too.
That use is constant and comprehensive. WhatsApp is the standard mode of communication for politicians and senior officials talking to colleagues, superiors, staff, rivals, loved ones, journalists and more. Petty jealousies, key decisions, the small print and the high strategy of matters of state, all are here.
How do we know this? We see intermittent leaks from the MP WhatsApp groups, normally when someone is having a strop, or a minister is calling for calm. When Isabel Oakeshott leaked Matt Hancock’s messages from the era of the pandemic, citing the public interest, the archive amounted to 2.3 million words in 100,000 WhatsApp messages.
Now, as the Covid-19 inquiry (in which Hancock, in fairness to him, voluntarily shared that correspondence) gets under way, such messages are revealed to be its meat and drink.
Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Dominic Cummings, Nicola Sturgeon, special advisers, senior scientific advisers, senior civil servants… WhatsApp, WhatsApp, WhatsApp. All of them were hammering away, sending encrypted messages by the bucket load.
Why do people in public life rely on such messaging services so heavily? For the same – very good – reason that I do, and you probably do, too. Which is this: privacy matters, and the lack of it can be hugely expensive and damaging.
When working on sensitive matters, be they political, commercial or personal, what price would you put on security and the confidence of privacy, without risk of loss, embarrassment or disruption?
This is also the obvious explanation of why services offering such encrypted communication are booming, and why existing players in the market are increasingly moving to provide end-to-end encryption as a standard, baked-in part of their service. People want and value such security in an age of hackers, organised cybercriminals, and snooping hostile states.
Can you blame us? We increasingly live our lives, archive our most tender memories, run our businesses and manage our finances online – of course we want such precious activities protected by the highest possible security.
In this, at least, our rulers have a lot in common with those they govern. They know how much this means to the public, too. When it seemed like the Online Safety Bill might impinge on encrypted services so severely that WhatsApp and Signal threatened to exit the UK market, ministers scrambled to change and clarify their plans to allay that risk.
Our politicians are well aware that to become the party that killed everyone’s WhatsApp account would be to invite electoral disaster on a scale never before seen in this country. Losing such security would be vastly expensive, and a boon to both the criminal enemies of a law-abiding society and the tyrannical enemies of a free society.
They also know that the tech sector offers a huge opportunity for the future of the British economy. Just this week the Prime Minister set out his ambition for the UK to lead the world in forward-thinking, growth-friendly regulation at the AI summit at Bletchley Park.
How will it be possible to foster that future in this country without the right approach to cutting edge secure technologies, and without the protection such sectors need from industrial espionage?
Mark Wallace is the chief executive of the Total Politics Group
