First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 32
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- Some members of the House of Lords do understand the issue perfectly. Lord Strasburger put it quite succinctly: One feature of end-to-end encryption is that the provider cannot break it; encryption is private between the users at both ends. [Earl Howe] seems to be implying that providers can use only encryption which can be broken and therefore cannot be end to end, so the next version of the Apple iPhone would in theory become illegal. I think that there is quite a lot of work to be done on this. The Special Rapporteur thinks so too, and would suggest that much of the work that needs to be done lies in the direction of moving the Government of the United Kingdom away from the illusion that it can effectively outlaw end-to-end encryption or make it unavailable to persons inside the United Kingdom. This proposal is on the same level of illogical thinking as trying to ban knives altogether because they could occasionally be used for harm, or to ban cars because they are sometimes used as getaway vehicles. Moreover, the security risks introduced by deliberately weakened encryption are vastly disproportionate to the gains. Strasburger summarized: I want to emphasise - and anybody in the cryptography industry will spell this out - that you cannot have it both ways. Either encryption is secure, or it is not; it cannot be insecure for a small group of users and secure for everybody else. Lord Paddick pointed to an approach which would be more consistent with the case law of the European Court of Human Rights as last expressed in Zakharov v. Russia: "Instead of the power to force a company to remove encryption from a whole service or technology, alternative and more targeted powers should be used instead."9 The Special Rapporteur can, at the present stage, only wonder when common sense - never mind a deserved respect for fundamental human rights like privacy - will finally prevail in the State's debate on the subject.
- Legal status
- Non-negotiated soft law
- Body
- Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy
- Document type
- Special Procedures' report
- Means of adoption
- N.A.
- Topic(s)
- Governance & Rule of Law
- Year
- 2016
- Paragraph type
- Other
- Paragraph number
- 32
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