Banning Encryption Won't Help Beat IS Threat,What to Do?

Open, because they push their propaganda and highly produced videos out through very public channels: Twitter, YouTube and JustPaste.it The excellent investigation by Stuart Ramsay, Sky's chief correspondent, into Islamic State, shows their open and closed approach to technology. The group has a huge and co-ordinated social media presence, as Sky News first reported last summer. That raises the group's profile and fires the frustrated imaginations of young people previously unradicalised. Closed, because when that person decides to go a step further, they are invited off the open web, and on to encrypted messaging services.

From plain sight into dark corners. That creates a problem for security services, who say they can't track chats on encrypted messaging services. They include WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app in the world with more than 800 million users. David Cameron has asked: "In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?" In another speech he added: "We just want to ensure that terrorists do not have a safe space in which to communicate." The so-called Snooper's Charter, or Investigatory Powers Bill, is due to be presented by Theresa May this autumn and is expected to address encryption.The problem is that encryption doesn't give just terrorists a safe space in which to communicate.

It gives us all a safe space to communicate. And communication includes things like our online banking and shopping, our personal details. Any attempt to weaken encryption makes us all a bit more unsafe, to hackers, fraudsters and identity thieves, and it would weaken our thriving digital economy.

The hack of the US Office of Personnel Management revealed the most intimate details of millions of US citizens. There's no reason to think equivalent UK systems are any safer. So what to do? A ban on encryption simply won't work: the genie is out of the bottle, and the technology widely available. It will hurt only law abiding citizens, not terrorists. Cybersecurity experts and the UN have all warned against banning or weakening encryption, on technical and on human rights grounds. Stuart's investigation points to a solution: months of painstaking work, skilled infiltration and forensic analysis yielded real, useful information.

Safe spaces can be made unsafe for terrorists by traditional spycraft and what intelligence agencies call 'computer network exploitation' – hacking, to you and me. The threat is real, as technology constantly evolves. So must the techniques of the security services. Banning encryption would instead be a step backwards.