Former US intelligence officer and whistleblower Edward Snowden, in an opinion piece published by The Guardian on Tuesday, has spoken out against attempts by the governments of the United States, United Kingdom and Australia to make Facebook violate its clients' privacy by allowing security agencies to access their private communications
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th October, 2019) Former US intelligence officer and whistleblower Edward Snowden, in an opinion piece published by The Guardian on Tuesday, has spoken out against attempts by the governments of the United States, United Kingdom and Australia to make Facebook violate its clients' privacy by allowing security agencies to access their private communications.
On October 4, several law enforcement and security officials from the three countries mentioned, including US Attorney General William Barr, called on Facebook to refrain from implementing end-to-end encryption of messages in its services without providing law enforcement and security agencies with a means to access a user's communications if necessary.
"If Barr's campaign is successful, the communications of billions will remain frozen in a state of permanent insecurity: users will be vulnerable by design. And those communications will be vulnerable not only to investigators in the US, UK and Australia, but also to the intelligence agencies of China, Russia and Saudi Arabia - not to mention hackers around the world," Snowden wrote.
He also said that with an introduction of end-to-end encryption, intelligence and law enforcement agencies throughout the globe would have to go back to older investigative methods "that are both effective and rights-respecting, in lieu of total surveillance."
End-to-end encryption is a communication system designed to protect people's messages from being accessed by a third party by creating a unique set of "public/private keys" used to encrypt or decrypt messages sent to or from a user.
