The British government is launching a campaign against end-to-end encryption

A rather unconventional fight will take place in the British Isles. The government does not want Meta to use encryption in Messenger. There are even commercials that are supposed to turn public opinion to the side of the government.

The government does not want encrypted communication between citizens

End-to-end communication protection, which only the recipient sees except the sender, is not new. For example, the popular WhatsApp gives it to millions of users. Meta also took a similar path with its Messenger application. And quite surprisingly, it rose from the ministerial seat of the British government. And the decision came. A campaign needs to be made, aimed at ordinary people, to show that such encryption is harmful.

The main concern, which is allegedly hidden behind the reluctance to tolerate encryption on a known communicator, stems from the need to ensure the protection of children against any form of bullying. If encryption is set up to prevent government traffic from being monitored, it is said to make it significantly more difficult to detect such cases. On the one hand, the government is to get involved in the campaign British charities aimed at helping children in need or even law enforcement agencies with their experiences and specific caseswhen they detected cases of child abuse. And this is what the deployment of end-to-end communication protection is supposed to significantly prevent. The campaign will be media-based, through commercials, and will be deployed in print media and the government has set aside £ 534,000 (cca 642 tis. EUR).

The end of the campaign will be interesting

The campaign is also based on the fact that a large part of the public does not even know what end-to-end message encryption is. That is, when someone does not know that there is actually some possibility of protecting the communication and that they do not even need it, it will be easier to influence it. And get on your side. Otherwise, it is not entirely clear how the British government envisions the outcome and outcome of the campaign, because Meta will not abandon encryption and people will stop using Messenger just to introduce encryption. And in principle, they have nowhere to go, most of the competition (Signal, Telegram iMessage), including the owned WhatsApp goes the same way.

However, the government’s advertisement will be really interesting, and the main motives for influencing it will be an appeal to founder Mark Zuckerberg, and he should appear as a sensitive father who cannot tolerate the attackers escaping his network due to encryption. We will see.