Yahoo News The government wants to snoop on your WhatsApp messages
In the aftermath of the deadly attack on Westminster last week, the UK government has said it wants to gain access to private messages sent via WhatsApp and similar services.
When speaking on The Andrew Marr Show over the weekend, Home Secretary Amber Rudd expressed her deep concern over the privacy offered by WhatsApp and its peers.
"It is completely unacceptable, there should be no place for terrorists to hide," she said. "We need to make sure that organisations like WhatsApp, and there were plenty of others like that, don't provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with one another."
It has been discovered that last week's London attacker, Khalid Masood, used WhatsApp in the minutes before he drove through pedestrians on Westminster Bridge.
The police declared, however, that Masood was working alone that day, something that BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw said the police couldn't know without checking his phone.
"It used to be that people would steam open envelopes or listen in on phones when they wanted to find out what people were doing, legally, through warrantry," continued Rudd. "But in this situation we need to make sure that our intelligence services have the ability to get into situations like encrypted WhatsApp."
WhatsApp and many other commonly used services like iMessage and Facebook Chat use a system known as end-to-end encryption to keep data private.
When using end-to-end, messages are scrambled when leaving one device and then assembled on the other end. Only the sender and receiver possess the "shared key" to decode messages.
Technology companies such as WhatsApp aren't given the shared key even though the data passes through their servers, meaning they can't grant themselves or anyone else access to the message contents.
If the police or other security services want access to said contents, they have to gain it through one of the sending or receiving devices or accounts.
WhatsApp and iMessage use end-to-end decryption by default.
The Home Secretary has called Facebook, WhatsApp and other technology companies to a meeting this Thursday to discuss how the authorities can gain access to private messages when they see fit.
There has been heavy resistance to similar calls in the past. Tech companies are loath to build back doors into their encryption, which could then potentially be hacked. If there's a weakness, it's always possible that someone will exploit it.
It's unlikely that there will be any dramatic movement from the participating tech companies on their encryption policies as a result of the meeting, but the result could affect the privacy of millions of users who send message with WhatsApp, iMessage and Facebook in the UK every day.
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