WhatsApp In London: UK Officials Call For Encryption Backdoor After Westminster Attack

Following a terrorist attack in London last week, United Kingdom interior minister Amber Rudd said over the weekend it is “completely unacceptable” that the government cannot access the content of end-to-end encrypted messaging apps.

“There should be no place for terrorists to hide. We need to make sure organizations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don't provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other," Rudd said during an appearance on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show .

"We need to make sure that our intelligence services have the ability to get into situations like encrypted WhatsApp."

Read: Top 5 Free Encryption Messaging Apps To Keep Your Conversations Secure

Rudd’s call for government access to encrypted communications echoes the response from former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, who suggested blocking encrypted messaging services unless they provided a government backdoor following the Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015.

U.S. officials have also attempted to push companies to provide law enforcement with access to encrypted messages, including attempts to pressure Apple to break its own encryption protocol after the San Bernardino shooting in late 2015.

Brazil has taken the harshest stance in its push for access to encrypted content, going so far as to ban WhatsApp on several occasions over the company’s failure to cooperate with law enforcement investigations.

Read: Republicans Want Investigation On Government Employees Using Signal App

These requests often betray a lack of understanding as to how encrypted messaging services are designed to work. Communication via end-to-end encrypted apps require an encryption key to decode messages. Without the key, the messages would appear as a jumble of undecipherable characters.

For companies like Apple or Facebook—the owner of WhatsApp—to include a backdoor or any sort of access to messages that doesn’t require an encryption key to access would put at risk the entire premise of the protection; if encryption is cracked for one instance, the protection is no longer valid.

“I can’t build an access technology that only works with proper legal authorisation, or only for people with a particular citizenship or the proper morality. The technology just doesn’t work that way. If a backdoor exists, then anyone can exploit it,” Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and Electronic Frontier Foundation board member, wrote of encryption.

Rudd and other officials have received pushback from a number of security experts, including Major General Jonathan Shaw, the former cyber security chief of the U.K. Ministry of Defense. In an appearance on the BBC Radio 4 show Today, Shaw accused the government of trying to “use the moment” to push tech companies to compromise their protections.

Rudd will meet with representatives from technology companies including WhatsApp and Facebook later this week.