14 DAY TRIAL // World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee defends encrypted messaging apps and warns governments that weakening protections would be disastrous.
The declaration was made by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as he accepted his "Nobel Prize" in computing, the Alan Turing Award. His statement comes after messaging apps offering end-to-end encryption such as WhatsApp have been targeted by politicians who believe it is unacceptable for such capabilities to be in the hands of the people, especially since terrorists could also use them.
"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," he said.
One of the most recent attacks against WhatsApp came from British home secretary Amber Rudd who called on technology companies to give law enforcement agencies a door into their encryption. Her declaration came days after the Westminster terror attack in London, where Khalid Masood reportedly accessed WhatsApp minutes before killing three people. Authorities were upset they could not access those messages after WhatsApp said there was nothing it could do. Rudd went as far as to accuse WhatsApp of giving terrorists a place to hide by enabling users to have access to end-to-end encryption by default.
Governments should not have such power
Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft were reportedly called in for a meeting to discuss how they can put a stop to terrorism-related content being shared on their platforms. This, of course, is yet another topic that has sparked a lot of discussion over the years and is in no way new.
"It's not possible to build a system, which you can guarantee that only a definition of good guys can break. 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," Sir Berners-Lee added on the topic.
He later said that it is important for democracies that people have private conversations, as well as for business and for humans' day-to-day life.