Tim Berners-Lee Nadav Kander

The encryption techniques used by WhatsApp and similar services should be protected at all costs, and we need to "rethink" how the web works if we're to stop the spread of nasty ideas, according to Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Tim Berners-Lee: governments are 'trampling on our rights to privacy' The Web Tim Berners-Lee: governments are 'trampling on our rights to privacy'


Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, criticised political attempts to weaken encryption in a conversation with WIRED as he accepted the Association for Computing Machinery's Alan Turing Award. It is the 50th year of the award, named after the British mathematician and code-breaker.

"If encryption were not a thing then huge amounts of modern life would be impossible," Berners-Lee told WIRED. "If you put a hole in encryption – if you decide WhatsApp shouldn't be secure – then you do that to everything else that is equivalent to WhatsApp you'd have a battle in which you would have a huge number of disasters."

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The web creator's comments come after UK home secretary Amber Rudd called on technology companies to ensure encrypted communications could be accessed by law enforcement agencies. Her comments followed the Westminster attack in London, where Khalid Masood reportedly accessed WhatsApp minutes before killing three people.

Rudd, in an interview at the end of March, accused WhatsApp of giving terrorists "a place to hide" by using end-to-end encryption by default on all of the messages.


Following the comments, the home secretary called Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft to a meeting – described by the Labour party as "lame" – to discuss how they could stop terrorism-related content from being shared on their platforms.

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"It's not possible to build a system, which you can guarantee that only a definition of good guys can break," Berners-Lee said. "What you should do is you should build a system which will work in a world where there's a government in power that you do not trust at all. Giving that sort of power to the government is inappropriate."

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The Turing Award, which is often referred to as the 'Nobel Prize of computing,' comes with a $1 million prize fund and is supported by Google. Last year's award winners were cryptography pioneers Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. The pair were responsible for creating the idea behind public key cryptography – a crucial principle of encryption.


"Within the computer science community this is the award," Berners-Lee said. "It's an honour to be considered among these people, a lot of them are very serious, theoretical computer scientists. It's an incredible honour."

As well as creating the principle for the world wide web, Berners-Lee heads-up the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the World Wide Web Foundation. On March 12 this year, when the web turned 28, Berners-Lee wrote an open letter saying fake news, surveillance laws, and political advertising are future threats to the web.

#InternautDay and post-truth news in the Facebook era Facebook #InternautDay and post-truth news in the Facebook era

"The right of people to have a private conversation is really important for democracy," Berners-Lee told WIRED.. "It's really important for business and it is really important for human day-to-day life."

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"People in the same family who live in different cities need to be able to communicate privately without it being intercepted. Really, it is a human right. You can't mess with human rights like that without massive unexpected and very disastrous consequences."

As well as warning about the breaking of encryption Berners-Lee also said he would like to see a system where users of online apps and services could reclaim their own data. "The millennial generation are very aware of the privacy question," he said.

Such a system would make it easy to download all data from health services, wearable devices, banks and more. "The frustration isn't about people commercialsing my data. The frustration is that I am not taking advantage of my data."


"In the future there may be a tipping point, where the companies that people go for are the ones that allow them to access all their data".

Separately, Berners-Lee also commented on the need to "rethink" how society is built on top of social media websites. According to VentureBeat, the web's creator told the Innovate Finance global fintech summit in London that a "complete change of strategy" is needed.

“How come nasty, mean ideas seem to have travelled more prevalently than constructive ideas on Twitter sometimes?," Berners-Lee said. "Is that the way it has been designed? Could Twitter be tweaked?”