During an interview with BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show, UK’s home secretary Amber Rudd expressed her concern over communication platforms such as WhatsApp using end-to-end encryption. Rudd assumes that WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging apps are providing a ‘secret place for terrorist to communicate with each other.’
This statement comes after a terrorist attack in the UK which resulted in the death of three people last week. The terrorists’ phone was believed to have connected to WhatsApp but it remains unknown if anything was communicated. The home secretary told BBC that “It is completely unacceptable, there should be no place for terrorists to hide.”
She continued, “We need to make sure that organisations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other.”
“It used to be that people would steam open envelopes or just listen in on phones when they wanted to find out what people were doing, legally, through warranty.
“But on this situation we need to make sure that our intelligence services have the ability to get into situations like encrypted WhatsApp.”