Facebook needs to face facts on criminal behavior
SAY you invented something that became so popular more than a billion people around the globe used it. Wow! You’d be famous worldwide and one of the richest people on earth.
But then, say you discovered some of your customers were criminals using your product in nefarious ways. Terrorists were using it to communicate deadly plots among themselves. Con men were using it to scam millions of dollars from unsuspecting and vulnerable people. Child predators using your
- phy. What would your obligation be if law enforcement came knocking at your door asking to see information about your suspect customers?
This scenario is currently playing out between the US Department of Justice and Facebook’s massively popular subsidiary WhatsApp. The developers brag that the app enables customers to “make calls and send and receive messages, documents, photos and videos” directly from their phone or desktop computer that will remain strictly secret. It is advertised as having “sought-after services like end- to- end encryption, free internet- based international calling, cross-platform compatibility, [and] wide global reach.”
In layman’s terms, encryption means that all communications, whether sent from next door or the other side of the world, can be seen only by the sender and the receiver. There is no socalled “back door” for law enforcement to enter to look for evidence of criminal wrongdoings.
Let’s go hypothetical again. Say Sam Smith is sitting at his laptop in Toledo, Ohio, sending out videos of child pornography he’s just made. chat service now allows users to contact each other via private messages, but they’re not encrypted. They soon will be, if Zuckerberg gets his wish.
Great. More internet pathways for criminals to access to further their illegal ways.
I wonder what the folks at social media companies like Facebook, Google and YouTube thought when they read the shocking
article which recently revealed that tech companies reported more than 45 million online photos and videos of children and infants being sexually abused
than double what was discovered the year before. As the reported: “In some sense, increased detection of the spiraling problem is a sign of progress. Tech companies are legally required to report images of child abuse only when they discover them; they are not required to look for them.”
It is not just child predators we need to consider when thinking about the downside of widespread encryption. As I recently reported,
year to online romance scams, which mostly target lonely and elderly people. And terrorists use the internet as a strategic device in many ways. They turn to the worldwide web to recruit and train new members, to collect and transfer money, to incite violence, and to organize future terrorist attacks. To allow the tech companies to deliberately tie the hands of intelligence agencies and cybercrime detectives makes no sense.
US Attorney General William Barr, along