No encryption, Facebook urged

The United States, Britain and Australia are calling on Facebook to halt its plans to deploy strong encryption across all its messaging apps unless it can provide a way for investigators to see communications in the clear, launching a fresh salvo in a long-running war between Washington and Silicon Valley.

In a letter dated Oct. 4 to Facebook obtained by The Washington Post, U.S. Attorney General William Barr and his foreign counterparts urge Facebook to “enable law enforcement to obtain lawful access to content in a readable and usable format,” arguing that the company’s efforts could prove especially damaging for government investigations into child sexual abuse.

The dispute stems from a March announcement by Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who sketched out his vision for a “privacy-focused” future for Facebook and the services under its umbrella, including Instagram and WhatsApp. Zuckerberg said the company intends to integrate those services with Facebook’s Messenger app so that users can talk to one another across different apps if they want, while providing “end-to-end” encryption of their chats. Such strong encryption allows only the user and sender to be able to read or hear a conversation’s content.

In doing so, Barr and his colleagues said Facebook “puts our citizens and societies at risk by severely eroding a company’s ability to detect and respond to illegal content and activity, such as child sexual exploitation and abuse, terrorism, and foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine democratic values and institutions.”

The letter alleged that Facebook’s ability to detect child sexual exploitation would be severely hampered. Last year, Facebook made more than 16 million reports of child sexual exploitation and abuse content to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, U.S. and international authorities said. Encrypting chats across its services could mean about 12 million reports “would be lost,” U.S. and foreign officials estimated.

“Our understanding is that much of this activity, which is critical to protecting children and fighting terrorism, will no longer be possible if Facebook implements its proposals as planned,” they wrote.

In a statement, Facebook said it already is “consulting closely with child safety experts, governments and technology companies and devoting new teams and sophisticated technology so we can use all the information available to us to help keep people safe.”

“We strongly oppose government attempts to build backdoors because they would undermine the privacy and security of people everywhere,” added spokesman Andy Stone.