Amber Rudd delivered harsh warnings to WhatsApp and Apple over their use of encryption today - but it’s left people wondering whether she really knew what she was talking about.

She accused the tech firms of giving terrorists a ‘place to hide’ by using ‘end-to-end encryption’ in their messaging.

The Home Secretary complained Google was making it too easy to find material helpful to terrorists, like ‘stabbing instructions’.

She said she’d ask “the best people who understand the technology, who understand the necessary hashtags, to stop this stuff even being put up.”

And she called for them to work with government to allow a ‘back door’ into their services so spooks can read the messages.

There’s just one problem with that…

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Image:
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Here’s how end-to-end encryption works

End-to-end encryption means messages can only be decoded by the sender or receiver.

They use a publicly available algorithm to scramble and unscramble the message on the phone itself, rather than the encryption being done by the service provider.

The upshot of this is that Apple, WhatsApp, Telegram and other services that use the technology could not decrypt messages sent through their services if they wanted to.

Later, on Sky News, Sophy Ridge pointed out backdoors were incompatible with end-to-end encryption.

The Home Secretary insisted, both forcefully and wrongly, that they were not incompatible.

Would it be so bad if we didn't have end-to-end encryption?

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Image:
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Well, it depends on whether you like having your bank account hacked.

Allowing a back door into end-to-end encryption wouldn’t just make it less secure for terrorists - it’d make loads of things you do online every day more vulnerable to attacks from hackers.

This kind of security is not only used by messaging services. It’s used, entirely legitimately, by banks, card companies and healthcare providers to protect users from hackers.

And making them less secure for terrorists makes them less secure for everyone.

It’s a bit like the government telling locksmiths to make everyone’s front door locks less secure so the police can pick them more quickly in an emergency.

The internet’s response was NOT pretty