Westminster and Whatsapp - keys to the backdoor
3 min read
Former Minister for International Security Srategy, Dr Andrew Murrison MP, criticises Amber Rudd's proposals for Whatsapp to provide backdoors to encrypted messaging services in the wake of the Westminster terror attack.
Use a search engine and next thing you know a raft of adverts will pop up that are suspiciously related to what you’ve been browsing. The liberal left hardly raises an eyebrow at commercial outfits harvesting browsing history to deduce purchasing weaknesses and accurately profile individual citizens. Instead it screeches and screams at the state’s security apparatus for being able to do far less in the interest of preventing the kind of bloody mayhem we saw on 22nd March.
How odd.
Following the attack on Parliament by Khalid Masood, ministers have been quick to say that the state must be able to de-encrypt electronic messaging available in products like WhatsApp. They say this is the 21st century equivalent of men in bowler hats steaming open letters, now an unrewarding exercise.
When something dreadful happens, ministers perfectly reasonably rush to offer solutions, some new, some old ones dusted off. But always they need to explain how their solution – in this case access to the encrypted WhatsApp type messaging Masood allegedly used just before his murderous assault – might have prevented what then happened. After all, Masood was not, apparently, at the time a person of interest to the security services. We’re told he was completely off the radar and so, presumably, there would have been neither a warrant for the interception of his data nor a satisfactory case for one.
If our well intentioned ministers and their advisers don’t properly and in some detail explain what they want and why and if we, the scrutineers, just blithely accept the solution offered, we will facilitate a ratchet that allows more and more intrusion and the incremental destruction of our traditional freedoms and liberties, precisely the outcome violent jihadists want.
In late 2015 when the whips asked me to sit on the Joint Select Committee on the draft Investigatory Powers Bill, I said plainly that I had concerns about some elements of what we were being told was necessary to safeguard national security.
Particularly needful of scrutiny, in my view, was the potential harvesting of bulk data on ordinary citizens, the use by the state of intrusive powers by non-security related public bodies investigating relatively trivial matters, and the idea that the state might demand the means to unlock back doors to electronic encryption.
The Bill, which regularises a lot of existing custom and practice, emerged much the better for its pre-legislative scrutiny. I spoke in support of it when it returned to the House. Robust questioning at the draft stage of inter alia the minister in charge, now the Prime Minister, did not indicate mistrust of ministers or our duly warranted state security apparatus. Personally, I hold them in the highest regard having recently done two security-related ministerial jobs. No, the issues that continue to worry me are that state and non-state actors, hackers and criminal low life will exploit any and all opportunities offered by leaky bulk data sets and the weakening of encryption implied by the creation of backdoors.
If the state insists on providers creating backdoors into personal data, I’d give good odds on it not just being warranted public servants turning the key.
Bad men will be in there too like rats up a drainpipe.
Dr Andrew Murrison is the MP for South West Wiltshire and is a member of the National Security Strategy Joint Select Committee
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