U.K. officials to push against encryption
Meeting with tech leaders to focus on online hate speech
British government officials will meet with representatives of U.S. technology companies this week to demand that they do more to help in the fight against terrorism and online hate speech, the latest move in a widening global push against encryption technology that blocks access to the private messages of criminal and innocent users alike.
The meeting, set for Thursday, comes after Amber Rudd, Britain’s home secretary, said that the country’s intelligence agencies should have access to encrypted messages sent through WhatsApp, an instant-messaging service owned by Facebook. Her remarks are in response to the terrorist attack on Wednesday in London, when Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old Briton, drove a car into pedestrians, killing three of them, and then fatally stabbed a police officer.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, but its precise connection to Masood is not clear.
London police said on Monday that they were focusing on Masood’s communications and repeated a plea to anyone who knew him to come forward with tips.
“There has been much speculation about who Masood was in contact with immediately prior to the attack,” Neil Basu, a deputy assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan Police Service, who also coordinates counterterrorism policing nationwide, said in a statement.
Basu added that Masood’s communications on the day of the attack remained of high interest, and he asked London residents to come forward with any information they had on his activities or state of mind.
While Masood’s method “appears to be based on low sophistication, low-tech, low-cost techniques copied from other attacks,” and echoed calls by the Islamic State for attacks on police officers and civilians, Basu said that “at this stage, I have no evidence he discussed this with others.”
Basu added: “I know when, where and how Masood committed his atrocities, but now I need to know why. Most importantly, so do the victims and families.”
After several terrorist attacks in Europe and elsewhere, the region’s lawmakers and regulators, as well as some of their counterparts in the United States, now want Silicon Valley companies to do more to tackle potential threats.
For many policymakers, that includes opening up services like WhatsApp and Telegram, a rival messaging tool, to national intelligence agencies when they are investigating terrorist activities.
“We do want them to recognize that they have a responsibility to engage with government, to engage with law enforcement agencies when there is a terrorist situation,” Rudd told the BBC on Sunday, referring to tech companies. “They cannot get away with saying we are in a different situation. They are not.”
The move by British lawmakers is the latest effort in Europe to police how internet giants operate online.
This month, a German government minister, Heiko Maas, said that he would propose new legislation that could fine tech companies around $50 million if they failed to stop hate speech being spread on digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube.