‘I don’t need to understand how encryption works,’ admits UK Home Secretary

As BBC News reports, UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd has used a Conservative party conference event to once again share her desire to “combat” end-to-end encryption:

“I don’t need to understand how encryption works to understand how it’s helping – end-to-end encryption – the criminals. I will engage with the security services to find the best way to combat that.”

Rudd, who has recently claimed that “real people” don’t care if the likes of WhatsApp keep their messages private, had been asked by a member of the audience to explain how end-to-end encryption actually worked.

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The Home Secretary (perhaps sensibly) declined to tackle that challenge, and instead said:

“It’s so easy to be patronised in this business. We will do our best to understand it. We will take advice from other people but I do feel that there is a sea of criticism for any of us who try and legislate in new areas, who will automatically be sneered at and laughed at for not getting it right.”

Trust me Amber, we’re not laughing.

A accurate statement if you remove the words "need to"

— John E Dunn (@JohnEDunn) October 3, 2017

Fortunately, some sanity was restored at the event by one of the other speakers on the panel – Michael Beckerman of the Internet Association, representing the views of Google, Microsoft and other tech giants:

“Since it is just math and it has been invented it can’t uninvented… So even if every internet company that we represent said ‘ok we are turning off encryption’ you are just weakening the security for everybody in this room but that math, that technology still exists for others to use on other platforms.”

Encryption is a good thing.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.