Make no mistake, your privacy is at serious risk. In the U.S. there are legislative moves to ban VPNs. In Europe the focus is scanning content on devices to flag bad behavior. In the U.K. Apple has been forced to degrade iPhone security for millions of users.
Once these dominoes start to topple, there will be no going back.
These anti-privacy campaigns are driven by what the FBI terms “warrant-proof encryption,” which it warns “is a major public safety problem with real-world impacts to American families.” In these “lawless digital spaces,” it says, “bad actors are sexually exploiting children, conducting human trafficking, sharing terrorist propaganda, and distributing drugs like deadly fentanyl while evading law enforcement detection.”
Just to be clear, we’re not talking about the dark web or the shady recesses of the regular web where criminals lurk. We’re talking about some of the most downloaded apps on the planet. And that includes WhatsApp, Google Messages, iMessage and Facebook Messenger, the most popular messengers in the U.S. All those platforms fully encrypt your content, albeit Google Messages and iMessage do not cross-platform.
That end-to-end encryption means no one between the endpoint devices sending and receiving content can pierce the veil and access messages. That includes the likes of Meta, Apple and Google, but also law enforcement — even with a court order. At least not in transit — clearly if they have control of your phone, they see everything.
The FBI wants “responsibly managed encryption,” by which it means “providers who manage encrypted data being able to decrypt that data and provide it to law enforcement only in response to U.S. legal process.” The spin may be different, but that’s the exact same argument being pushed in the U.K., Europe and elsewhere.
This isn’t a one-way process, it ebbs and flows. We have just seen a victory — for now — in the fight against Europe’s device scanning chat control, and the U.K. government has backed down on its demand for Apple to provide access to user content across the world, now only U.K. citizens will have less iPhone privacy than users in China.
In the U.S., there’s no legislative mandate for this yet. But be warned — that’s just politics. If the U.K. gets what it wants and Australia does the same, there will be an argument in the U.S. to follow an emerging Five Eyes standard, likely with some caveats around national security and child protection versus more trivial snooping.
Beyond governmental overreach, the main argument against compromising end-to-end encryption is that once defenses are lowered for the “good guys” they inevitably let the “bad guys” in. It was (ironically) the FBI that warned citizens to stop texting in December, as Chinese hackers marauded through U.S. networks. Albeit the bureau — unlike CISA — quickly qualified its advice to “responsibly managed encryption.”
Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been sparring with WhatsApp again, accusing Meta’s mega messenger of accessing user content for ads, which he describes as a “massive security vulnerability.” WhatsApp denies this, albeit if the FBI were to get its way the sanctity of its end-to-end encrypted enclave would be lost and content would be accessible.
For now, don’t ignore these rumblings. Once platforms drop their defenses as Apple is now doing in the U.K., it’s hard to see them ever coming back.
You have been warned.