WHATSAPP A PLACE FOR ‘TERRORISTS TO HIDE’

U.K. minister calls for end of encryption

Security services must be allowed to crack into encrypted messaging services or terrorists will enjoy a digital “place to hide,” Britain’s top security official said Sunday, re-igniting a fiery debate over privacy on the Internet.

Amber Rudd, the U.K.’s home secretary, made the comments after police discovered that London’s Westminster attacker had sent a text via WhatsApp just before his rampage.

Rudd said investigators have been unable to access the message sent on the hugely popular service. WhatsApp is equipped with end-to-end encryption, meaning the company — now owned by Facebook — has no way to intercept its users’ communications, even if police present them with a warrant.

The technology industry has zealously defended such features as crucial to protecting online privacy, while many governments have decried what they call a gift to violent extremists.

“It is completely unacceptable, there should be no place for terrorists to hide,” Rudd told the BBC. “We need to make sure that organizations like WhatsApp — and there are plenty of others like that — don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other.”

She called for a “back door” into the networks, allowing security services with proper authorization to access messages, while leaving encryption in place for the rest of the system.

But a Canadian expert on terrorists and their use of the Internet questioned Sunday whether giving governments such powers would be wise, noting that encryption “saves lives” of many people living under repressive regimes.

Compromising WhatsApp’s secrecy would likely just drive people to other services, said Yannick Veilleux Lepage, with the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at Scotland’s St. Andrews University. He noted that al Qaeda actually had its own encryption system — called Mujahedin Secrets — as long ago as 2007.

“I’m not necessarily convinced by the argument that this is the holy key for terrorist prevention,” he said in an interview. “This is the typical knee-jerk, opportunistic, populist reaction from a government. It will serve very little, other than to infringe the privacy of individuals.”

Khalid Masood killed three people as he plowed into pedestrians on London’s Westminster Bridge, then stabbed to death a police officer outside the British Parliament. Moments later, Masood was shot dead by other police.

It’s not the first time that WhatsApp — which introduced full encryption for its billion-plus users last year — has been accused of playing a role in terrorism.

The jihadists who carried out the 2015 attacks on the Bataclan nightclub and other locations in Paris are believed to have employed WhatsApp in their planning. Israeli police say a Palestinian man who stabbed two Israeli border guards this month was part of a WhatsApp chat group called “The road to paradise.”

Last year, two Moroccan nationals were arrested on terrorism charges in Italy after one of them inadvertently sent a WhatsApp message to the wrong number.

“The use of encryption is at the centre of the terrorist trade craft,” FBI director James Comey charged after the Paris attack.

The issue probably had its most contentious airing when the U.S. Justice Department pressured Apple to give it access to the password-locked iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorists. Messaging between iPhones also has end-to-end encryption. Apple refused, though U.S. authorities say they eventually were able to break into the phone.

Veilleux-Lepage argued that accessing such communication would be of limited value, noting the Westminster attacker seems to have acted alone, while the San Bernardino terrorists were a husband-and-wife team who would not need online encryption to talk secretly to each other.

Authorities in the U.S. and elsewhere say that getting access to digital messaging, with judicial approval, is no different than legal tapping of phones lines.

Tech-industry leaders respond that opening a back door to Western democratic governments would likely let in more despotic regimes and hackers, too, defeating encryption’s purpose.

Plus, the developers of WhatsApp say, before the advent of the telephone, authorities never had an easy way of snooping on their citizens.

“If you look at human history in total, people evolved and civilizations evolved with private conversations and private speech,” co-founder Brian Acton told Wired magazine last year. “If anything, we’re bringing that back to individuals.”