The Justice Department has renewed its fight for access to encrypted communications, arguing that it is a vital crime-fighting tool as technology companies and advocates have countered that it will threaten individual privacy, the New York Times reports. Attorney General William Barr took aim at Facebook’s plan to make WhatsApp and its other messaging services more secure, pressing its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to create a loophole to full encryption. The Justice Department said investigators need lawful access to encrypted communications to fight terrorism, organized crime and child pornography. “Companies should not deliberately design their systems to preclude any form of access to content even for preventing or investigating the most serious crimes,” Barr, joined by his British and Australian counterparts, wrote Zuckerberg.
Barr’s request was the latest salvo in a long fight by law enforcement officials for access to popular communications platforms that have become increasingly secure. The letter showed that the Justice Department was trying a coordinated approach with allies to prod technology companies to change their position. At issue are end-to-end encryption, which would ensure that only the sender and recipient can read messages sent using a particular messaging service, and “back doors,”which would give authorities access to such data. “End-to-end encryption already protects the messages of over a billion people every day,” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone. “We strongly oppose government attempts to build back doors because they would undermine the privacy and security of people everywhere.” With 1.5 billion users, Facebook’s WhatsApp is perhaps the world’s most common encrypted communications platform. The Justice Department and its counterparts in Australia and Britain are focusing on Facebook because of Zuckerberg’s plan to add end-to-end encryption to all of the company’s platforms.