Trump Administration Looks to Ban Crucial Online Privacy Feature

CYBERSPACE—The Donald Trump administration’s National Security Council held a special, closed-door meeting last week, according to a report by Politico, where top officials reportedly discussed ideas for stripping internet users of a privacy feature that may be the most important took for keeping online communications secure and free from the prying eyes—including the eye of the government. That feature is known as end-to-end encryption—meaning that the content of any communications are scrambled and can be read only by the user sending the message, and the user receiving it. End-to-end encryption is now found in many popular messaging apps, including the Facebook-owned WhatsApp, and the Apple apps iMessage and Facetime. Computer security experts, however, consider the open-source messaging app Signal to be the “gold standard” of end-to-end encryption apps available for the general online consumer, according to TechCrunch. But the increasingly common use of end-to-end encryption has created an ongoing “feud” between Silicon Valley tech firms and the government, which badly wants access to any online communication. Tech firms have consistently refused to help government investigators gain access to encrypted messages, frustrating efforts to crack down on “terrorism, drug trafficking and child pornography,” according to the Politico report. "Technology is moving fast, and privacy needs to move with it," Joel Wallenstrom, CEO of Wickr, a messaging platform that Forbes described as “uber-secure,” told the publication. "These are all completely legitimate, understandable even predictable concerns coming from law enforcement and elsewhere." The NSC officials discussed two options at the behind-the-scenes meeting last week, as 9to5 Mac reported, including simply proposing legislation to Congress that would outlaw end-to-end encryption altogether. The other, softer option discusse by NSC officials was to “put out a statement or a general position on encryption, and [say] that they would continue to work on a solution,” according to Politico. The British Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ—the United Kingdom’s digital and electronic security service—proposed its own system under which governments would be allowed by tech companies to secretly “listen” in on end-to-end encrypted conversations, but Apple and other tech firms rejected the so-called “ghost” proposal. Photo By Santeri Viinamäki / Wikimedia Commons