At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday that was attended by Apple and Facebook representatives who testified about the worth of encryption that hasnt been weakened, Sen.
The most recent salvos have been launched following the privacy manifesto that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published in March.
At the time, Zuckerberg framed the companys new stance as a major strategy shift that involves developing a highly secure private communications platform based on Facebooks Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp services.
Facebooks plan is to leave the three chat services as standalone apps but to also stitch together their technical infrastructure so that users of each app can talk to each other more easily.
The plan also includes slathering the end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp which keeps anyone, including Facebook itself, from reading the content of messages onto Messenger and Instagram. At this point, Facebook Messenger supports end-to-end encryption in secure connections mode: a mode thats off by default and has to be enabled for every chat.
US Attorney General William Barr and law enforcement chiefs of the UK and Australia signed an open letter calling on Facebook to back off of its encryption on everything plan unless it figures out a way to give law enforcement officials backdoor access so they can read messages.
In the letter, WhatsApp and Messenger heads Will Cathcart and Stan Chudnovsky said that any backdoor access into Facebooks products created for law enforcement would weaken security and let in bad actors who would exploit the access.
The only real difference in the events of this week is the renewed call for legislation to force backdoors: a threat that is apparently uniting both sides of this otherwise extremely partisan Congress and hence carries that much more weight.
Original article