Two months after the British, American and Australian governments wrote an open letter to Facebook asking it to not implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging platforms or build a backdoor to it for law enforcement agencies, Facebook and WhatsApp have replied (available below) and refused to do either. The letter was sent by Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, and Stan Chudnovsky, the head of Messenger. Why did they send the open letter? On October 4, US Attorney General William Barr, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin K. McAleenan, British Home Secretary Priti Patel, and Australian Home Minister Peter Dutton had written to Facebook asking it to let law enforcement get lawful access to content in a readable and usable format (read: build backdoor) and “not deliberately design their systems to preclude any form of access to content”. Why don’t…
