Theresa May Tries To Push Forward With Plans To Kill Encryption, While Her Party Plots Via Encrypted Whatsapp

from the so-about-that... dept

As we've discussed a few times, Theresa May and her colleagues have been pushing to break real encryption as part of the party's manifesto. And they've used recent terrorist attacks as an excuse to ramp up that effort -- even though the perpetrators of recent attacks were already known to law enforcement and there's no evidence encryption played any role. Earlier in the year, Home Secretary Amber Rudd had insisted that encrypted communications were completely unacceptable, and specifically namechecked Whatsapp:

It is completely unacceptable. There should be no place for terrorists to hide. We need to make sure that organisations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other.

Of course, as you've certainly heard by now, last Thursday's general election in the UK (understatement alert!) didn't quite go according to Theresa May's plan, and she's now left in a much weaker position with many people expecting she will not survive long as Prime Minister. And yet, showing her uncanny ability to double down on the absolute wrong thing, May is insisting she's moving ahead with her plans to regulate the internet, which will require vast censorship and a breaking of encryption. On the encryption angle, she's already got some Parliamentary support given that (as we and others warned at the time!) the Snooper's Charter ("Investigatory Powers Act") included a bit that would require anyone offering encrypted communications to unencrypt those communications (which is impossible if the encryption is strong end-to-end, and only possible with broken, insecure, fake "encryption").

This is both dumb and... hilarious. Because while all of this is going on, Theresa May's own party has been trying to figure out what the hell they're going to do. And, of course, the way they're communicating with each other is with the encrypted Whatsapp software that Amber Rudd was trashing just months ago:

Former minister Ed Vaizey told the BBC that he supports May staying on, but that Tories were discussing possible replacements. Asked whether members were calling one another to plot May’s ouster this weekend, he denied it. “That’s so 20th century,” he said. “It’s all on WhatsApp.”

Indeed, soon after this came out, one of the possible candidates to replace May, Boris Johnson, claimed that he was sticking by May and... released screenshots of his own Whatsapp conversations to prove that he was supporting her.

NEW: @itvnews has seen WhatsApp messages sent by Boris Johnson to Tory MPs urging them "to calm down and get behind the Prime Minister". pic.twitter.com/43oizi2ZE7 — Daniel Hewitt (@DanielHewittITV) June 11, 2017

So, there you have it. Theresa May is pushing forward to break encrypted chat apps like Whatsapp, while her own party is using encrypted chat apps, like Whatsapp, to discuss whether or not to keep her in place as Prime Minister.

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Filed Under: backdoors, boris johnson, encryption, privacy, theresa may, uk

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