Terrorist Attacks and Technology
In light of the recent terrorist attacks in London when Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old Briton, drove a car into pedestrians, killing three of them, and then fatally stabbed a police officer, British government officials are planning to meet with representatives of American technology companies to demand that they do more to help in the fight against terrorism and online hate speech. This is the latest move in a widening global push against encryption technology that blocks access to the private messages of criminal and innocent users alike. Amber Rudd, Britain’s home secretary, said that the country’s intelligence agencies should have access to encrypted messages sent through WhatsApp, an instant-messaging service owned by Facebook.
Neil Basu, a deputy assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan Police Service, stated that Mr. Masood’s communications on the day of the attack remained of high interest, and he asked London residents to come forward with any information they had on his activities or state of mind. A key statement from Mr. Basu is that, “I know when, where and how Masood committed his atrocities, but now I need to know why. Most importantly, so do the victims and families.” It is only having access to the encrypted communication that the London Police force will be able to gain these answers.
While law makers and regulators in Europe and around the world now want Silicon Valley companies to do more to tackle potential threats, such tech companies and digital rights advocates have said such efforts would infringe on human rights because providing the authorities with access to such messaging services would require weakening their overall levels of encryption. Recently, a German government minister, Heiko Maas, said that he would propose new legislation that could fine tech companies around $50 million if they failed to stop hate speech being spread on digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube.
The tech companies in question say they cannot hand over such information because internet messages are sent through so-called end-to-end encryption. This technology scrambles messages to make them indecipherable to anyone but their intended recipient. It also makes messages unreadable when they pass through an app’s server, meaning companies do not have the ability to provide the information to law enforcement even if they wanted to.
Encryption is used to protect data both while it is being sent across a network, data in transit, and stored, such as on a hard drive, smartphone or flash drive, data at rest. The primary purpose of encryption is to protect the confidentiality of digital data stored on computer systems or transmitted via the Internet or other computer networks. Modern encryption algorithms play a vital role in the security assurance of IT systems and communications as they can provide not only confidentiality, but also authentication, integrity, and non-repudiation.
Data which is referred to as plaintext, is encrypted using an encryption algorithm and an encryption key. This process generates a ciphertext that can only be viewed in its original form if decrypted with the correct key. Decryption is simply the inverse of encryption, following the same steps but reversing the order in which the keys are applied.
