Facebook is not providing law enforcement with any investigative access to any of its encrypted messaging offers ahead of the senate hearing on encryption early next week. This was what the company's executives told Attorney General William Barr. In an open letter, the FB bosses said, the law enforcement couldn't enter without having the door opened to criminals and hackers.
Specifically, Facebook's WhatsApp head Will Cathcart and Stan Chudnovsky, who oversees FB's Messenger app, wrote, "The 'backdoor's access you are demanding for law enforcement would be a gift to hackers, criminals, and respective regimes" making way for these (unwanted) people to take in their system and leaving an individual or platform of Facebook more susceptible to real-life dangers.
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Response to Barr's Criticism on Facebook
The said letter was Facebook's response to AB Barr, who, about a couple of months ago, wrote the company, criticizing it for making the law enforcement investigations much more challenging by providing encrypted messages which only the sender and the receiver can understand and read. More so, FB sent the executives too, to testify at the said hearing. Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice did not immediately respond when it was requested to comment on the issue.
In an article The Vege published earlier this year, it was indicated that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, announced that the company would strongly pivot into "end-to-end encrypted messaging." The original infrastructure of FB's three messaging offerings: WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram would be tied altogether and become more private. About the letter sent to Facebook in October, the Justice Department took Facebook's privacy announcement as a suggestion that its plan would be an advantage for the criminals, particularly the sex traffickers, as well as the pedophiles. Relatively too, according to Bar, firms should not intentionally design their system to prohibit any access to content, even for prohibiting or investigating the crimes considered the most serious.
Encryption's History
These arguments of the FB executives are not new. For quite some time now, encryption experts have been arguing to lawmakers that the good guys cannot just access encrypted messaging without the risk that the bad guys are to gain access, too. This came out most remarkably when FBI obtained, as part of its probe into a mass shooting, to oblige Apple to develop a computer code that could have encryption of Apple weakened. Nevertheless, the range of Facebook's plans of integrating end-to-end encryption into messaging is taking in the technology much further into the public's attention.
In the latter part of this year's 1st quarter, in a blog post, Zuckerberg detailed how the end-to-end encryption would turn more dominant to the messaging products of the company. This FB CEO acknowledged that offering this service would certainly give the criminals another way of sending messages to each other. These are messages investigations themselves, cannot read and understand. And as promised, FB would work with law enforcement in addressing the issue.
In the said blog post he wrote, they are working for the improvement of their ability to determine and stop the bad actors within the apps by identifying the patterns of activities through other channels, even when they cannot see the messages. Zuckerberg added in the same blog post that the company will continue to continue investing in this work. And as for the work, Chudnovsky and Cathcart's letter made it clear that such work will not engage the weakening of the encryption itself. Again, they emphasized that it would put the users in danger.
