British Home Intelligence Chief Ken McCallum on Friday warned of the risks posed by Facebook’s plan to end-to-end encryption of its communications.
“Decisions made in boardrooms in California are as relevant to our ability to do our job as decisions made in Afghanistan or Syria,” the MI5 chief told Times radio.
“We don’t want to live in a society where the state has a camera in everyone’s living room,” “but our job is to take care of one in a million cases,” “when the living room is the living room. ‘a terrorist,’ he said.
And if he is building a bomb, the intelligence services must be able to have access to the room, by requesting through the Ministry of the Interior the authorization of an independent judge to do so, a- he explained.
A full encryption system effectively gives “terrorists or people who organize child sexual abuse online (….) a pass where they know no one can see what they are doing in their private room. Ken McCallum added in his first interview since his appointment a year ago.
When he was appointed, Ken McCallum, who in 2018 led the investigation into the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, made the new possibilities brought by technology one of his priorities.
According to him, it is not a question of seeking to establish “state surveillance” but of being able to have access to information when the authorities and a judge consider that this access is “necessary and proportionate”.
The British intelligence chief thus pleads for a “partnership” with companies like Facebook, “to have access to the content of these communications”, in these specific cases. “That’s all, not for the rest of society,” he said.
Over the past four years, the anti-terrorist services have, according to him, foiled 29 plans for attacks, including 10 from the extreme right.
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