Should U.S. law enforcement have the right to look at your encrypted messages on Whatsapp if they have a warrant? The U.S. Attorney General William Barr is saying yes at a conference today, citing national security concerns.
Aside from privacy-conscious internet users, the encryption technology, which allows messages only to be seen by the sender and the receiver, is also being used by terrorists, drug cartels, and human traffickers.
Attorney-General said that law enforcement’s inability to check on these messages puts the security of society at high risk.
“If you remove any possibility that the cops are going to be watching a neighborhood, the criminals already in the neighborhood are going to commit a lot more crimes,” he said in a speech during a cyber-security conference at Fordham Law School in New York.
Barr cited specific alarming examples to prove his case.
He said the popular messaging app Whatsapp was the primary communication method of a Mexican cartel.
This cartel not only used the app to traffic large quantities of fentanyl from Asia to the U.S. but also to coordinate hundreds of murders of Mexican police officers.
Barr said that if U.S. law enforcement was able to access the chat in a more timely way, lives could be saved.
The debate over the encryption of devices and apps is not new, however. Law enforcement and tech companies have been battling since 2016 when Apple refused to unlock an iPhone of a Californian gunman for the FBI to investigate.
Tech companies have been saying that if they opened backdoors for law enforcement, this access could also be detected and exploited by criminals.
Barr called on tech companies to work it out.
“But I am suggesting that it is well past time for some in the tech community to abandon the posture that a technical solution is not worth exploring and instead turn their considerable talent to developing products that will reconcile good cybersecurity to the imperative of public safety and national security,” he said.
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