Our right to privacy could be about to change

Today, the UK government is expected to pass its long-discussed ‘Online Safety Bill’, presented as a package of new powers to protect people online. This includes stronger measures to keep illegal content off digital platforms, and new powers to enforce age verification for accessing platforms.

However, an ultimately chilling and unprecedented development will come along with it: the effective outlawing of end-to-end encryption for everyone.

Whenever you send a text message to your partner, a photo to a friend, it’s likely end-to-end encrypted. In short, only you and the recipient can see the content. It’s private. It means that nobody else can see it, even though it’s travelling across the world.

This is possible through cryptography, with many platforms built on established standards that effectively ‘scramble’ content in such a way that it can only be decrypted with the possession of a verified ‘key’. It means that a conversation between two parties remains just that.

The issue that the government is trying to address, is that the only way it can access this content is through a device that retains such a key. Generally, this means physical access to the device.

The government has been attempting to circumvent encryption for a long time, previously calling for enhanced powers to remove ‘safe spaces’ for criminals—at the time, specifically as an anti-terror effort in the wake of the London Bridge attacks in 2017.

Fast-forward to today, and whilst the message has been repackaged, it’s ultimately the same.

This legislation directly impacts the most vulnerable people in our society rather than protecting them; people who face severe dangers and threats in their everyday lives, and rely on encryption to communicate with trusted people safely and securely. Whether it’s victims of trafficking, political dissidents fleeing their countries, or cases of domestic violence, these platforms are crucial.

Despite this, the government believes that undermining the fundamentals of cryptography will save lives, rather than risk them. This is the same government that has presided over an infamous flurry of cybersecurity breaches in recent months.

One solution it has suggested is by opening ‘backdoors’ into communications platforms. This is effectively wiretapping in the digital age, adding an invisible third-party into an end-to-end encrypted communications channel. Inter-government and wider-ranging cybersecurity integrity issues aside, this presents numerous questions on how this power would be used in reality.

The critical question that remains unanswered, however, is what problem the government thinks it’s going to solve with this legislation. It’s naïve at best to assume criminals will even continue to use platforms with ‘backdoors’ where law enforcement can effectively monitor, when they can simply use foreign platforms through a VPN, or even build their own ‘subterranean’ platform operating outside of the law.

Yet the ultimate cost for us all is the permanent erosion of our fundamental right to privacy—whether that’s through enhanced state-led surveillance, or the potential withdrawal of communications platforms entirely.

Cryptography is just mathematics and computer science—and the fundamentals have not changed. In fact, this entire paragraph was encrypted with a popular encryption specification that can only be decrypted with a retained key, even if it’s transmitted in plain text for everyone to see at the top of a blog post (or if it’s re-written at the end…)

Most of us use end-to-end encryption every day, and arguably take it for granted. But for others, it’s a lifeline. Let’s hope we don’t lose it.