Peter Nowak: Backdoor to WhatsApp is modern day idea of phone tapping

While politicians may have noble intentions in asking for a security backdoor to the messenger app, doing so would open up the risk of causing far more harm than the good it would do.

Creating an encryption backdoor in WhatsApp is like creating a deadly virus to study it. Dado Ruvic / Reuters

Among the more unfortunate side effects of the technologically advanced world we live in are the demands by politicians for further weakening of personal privacy following every terrible incident.

The latest comes from the British home secretary Amber Rudd, who is calling on technology companies to build back doors into their messaging apps following the March 22 terror attack in London in which five people were killed. The killer used WhatsApp, the popular messaging app owned by Facebook, just before attacking.

By encrypting all WhatsApp messages, the social network company is effectively enabling “a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other”, Ms Rudd told the BBC. She is planning to speak with various tech companies to see what can be done about this supposed problem.

Her attitude is understand­able. Politicians’ constituents generally want action, or at least a scapegoat, when something bad happens. Pointing a finger and promising new safety measures is a time-honoured way of restoring stability and easing troubled minds.

But in the case of encryption and the larger issue of privacy, positions such as the one taken by Ms Rudd are severely misguided. Her comments show an ignorance of the importance of encryption, as well as a misunderstanding of the very nature of privacy.

End-to-end encryption – where data is effectively locked at one end of a communication and can only be unlocked with a proper key at the other – has become a fundamental underpinning of modern society.

Without it, not only would all communications be public knowledge, corporate and defence secrets would flow across the internet like virtual water and the economy would collapse as cyber-criminals pillage every bank account on the planet.

Back doors are unfortunate like that. They may be created with noble intentions – to give the good guys a leg up – but they can also be acquired by the bad guys once they exist.

Creating encryption-breaking tools could therefore be very much like bio-engineering a new virus with the intent of studying it.

It is fine in the lab and could even yield positive breakthroughs, but what would happen if it got out and, well, went viral? It is not an overstatement to say that we may as well pack up the internet and go home if we’re going to purposely develop such capabilities.

Unfortunately for politicians who are searching for quick solutions, privacy is here to stay, or it is for at least as long as there is technology. Privacy is, ironically, largely a by-product of technology – and it doesn’t wane in the face of new advances. Rather, the need and desire for it increases with every new development.

Consider that personal space, real or virtual, wasn’t a common expectation not too long ago. It was only when the Industrial Revolution brought electrification to the masses that home heating became commonplace. Freed from the need to huddle together for warmth, families drifted into their own individual rooms in ever-expanding homes, and personal spaces and individual bedrooms arose. So did secrets.

The postal system, the telephone, personal banking, medical institutions, photography – all products of scientific and technological advances – furthered the public’s need for privacy, to keep that growing mound of personal secrets away from others. Eventually, laws arose to enshrine those needs.

It is popular today to think that people’s expectations of privacy have diminished as the internet has made over-sharing of personal details through social media incredibly easy, especially for younger people. But there is proof that the opposite is actually happening.

In an important study a decade ago, researchers in Canada asked a group of teenagers if they were concerned that their private messaging through apps such as BlackBerry’s BBM could be accessed by governments or the companies themselves.

The teenagers said they couldn’t care less about such entities being privy to their conversations. They were far more concerned about their parents listening in.

Messaging was their preferred method of communication because it couldn’t be overheard by mom and dad, which is the primary reason why texting and private messaging killed the phone call.

In her recent interview with the BBC, Ms Rudd lamented that there was once a time when police could simply obtain a warrant and tap into a suspect’s phone to listen in on everything being said. She appears to be in favour of developing the modern equivalent.

But even if such tools were created, would they be effective? The answer is, probably not.

If teenagers can instinctively use the technological tools available to them to avoid having their parents discover their intimate details, how difficult would it be for criminals and terrorists to do the same?

The tech week’s winner and loser

Winner of the Week: Facebook. The social network has implemented new facial recognition tools that prevent users from re-sharing photos that have previously been tagged as "revenge porn", or nude photos that have been published without the subject's permission. Users and activist groups had been asking the company to do more to combat this problem.

Loser of the Week: Spotify. The world's largest subscription music streaming service has agreed to restrict new albums from Universal Music artists to its premium tier for a period of time after their release. Free tier users will now have to wait at least two weeks to stream such albums.

Peter Nowak is a veteran technology writer and the author of Humans 3.0: The Upgrading of the Species

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