Britain to win EU support over bid to access London attacker's final WhatsApp messages
Britain is today expected to win the support of European nations including France and Germany as it seeks to give the security services access to Westminster attacker Adrian Ajao's final Whatsapp message.
The Home Secretary said on Sunday that it was “completely unacceptable” that Whats App – which is owned by Facebook – was enabling terrorists to communicate “in secret”, knowing the police and security services will not be able to read their encrypted communications.
She has summoned WhatsApp, Facebook, Google and a host of other online firms to showdown talks at the Home Office on Thursday, where she says she will “call time” on extremists “using social media as their platform”.
She today travels to Brussels for a meeting with interior ministers from the 27 other EU member states, who officials said are likely to support the UK's case.
France and Germany have previously asked the European Commission to force technology companies to limit the encryption used to keep messages public.They have said that they want the power to force companies to "remove illicit content or decrypt messages".
WhatsApp, which has a billion users worldwide, has said that protecting its users’ private communication is one of its “core beliefs”.
Company sources said that “with end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp does not have access to the content of messages. Only the sender and the recipient can read the messages on their devices”.
But the Home Secretary said: “We have to have a situation where we can have our security services get into the terrorists’ communications. There should be no place for terrorists to hide. We would do it all through the carefully thought-through legally covered arrangements but they cannot get away with saying ‘We are a different situation.’ They are not.
“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.”
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, said the security services had “huge, huge powers of investigation already – there is a question of always balancing the right to know, the need to know, with the right to privacy.”
Asked if the balance was right at the moment, he said: “I think it probably is.”
WhatsApp was blocked three times last year in Brazil for failing to hand over information relating to criminal investigations.
Judges ordered telecoms providers to block the service. Rival messaging services such as Telegram are also encrypted, but their software has been written to enable law enforcement agencies to access messages where they can prove it is a necessary part of a criminal investigation.
Police in Germany knew Anis Amri was planning a suicide attack nine months before he drove a lorry into a packed Christmas market in Berlin last December, killing 12, because they had been able to access encrypted Telegram messages.
