Attorney General Bill Barr, along with officials from the United Kingdom and Australia, is set to publish an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking the company to delay plans for end-to-end encryption across its messaging services until it can guarantee the added privacy does not reduce public safety.

A draft of the letter, dated Oct. 4, is set to be released alongside the announcement of a new data-sharing agreement between law enforcement in the US and the UK; it was obtained by BuzzFeed News ahead of its publication.



Signed by Barr, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, acting US Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, and Australian Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton, the letter raises concerns that Facebook’s plan to build end-to-end encryption into its messaging apps will prevent law enforcement agencies from finding illegal activity conducted through Facebook, including child sexual exploitation, terrorism, and election meddling.

"Security enhancements to the virtual world should not make us more vulnerable in the physical world," the letter reads. "Companies should not deliberately design their systems to preclude any form of access to content, even for preventing or investigating the most serious crimes."

The letter calls on Facebook to prioritize public safety in designing its encryption by enabling law enforcement to gain access to illegal content in a manageable format and by consulting with governments ahead of time to ensure the changes will allow this access. While the letter acknowledges that Facebook — which owns Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram — captures 99% of child exploitation and terrorism-related content through its own systems, it also notes that "mere numbers cannot capture the significance of the harm to children."

"Risks to public safety from Facebook’s proposals are exacerbated in the context of a single platform that would combine inaccessible messaging services with open profiles, providing unique routes for prospective offenders to identify and groom our children," the letter reads.

In a three paragraph statement, Facebook said it strongly opposes government attempts to build backdoors. A spokesperson for the Department of Justice declined to comment.

"I actually wouldn’t be surprised if we end up having similar engagements like this on other socially important things that we’re trying to move, like our big push to get towards more encryption across our messaging apps," Zuckerberg said in a closed-door July meeting with employees, according to leaked audio obtained by the Verge. "That will, over time, be very sensitive when we get closer to rolling it out."

"Law enforcement, obviously, is not going to be psyched about that," he added. "But we think it’s the right thing to protect people’s privacy more, so we’ll go defend that when the time is right."

Facebook’s much-publicized turn toward privacy, officially announced in a March post by Zuckerberg, was in part a response to years of public scrutiny over the company’s fast and loose approach to data privacy, touched off by the revelation in early 2018 that the tech giant had let the British election consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvest the data of up to 87 million users.

Here's the full draft of the letter.