By Robert McMillan, Jeff Horwitz and Dustin Volz
U.S. Attorney General William Barr has asked Facebook Inc. to
hold off on plans to add encryption throughout its messaging
services, citing public safety in a push to force the social-media
giant to delay a major strategic shift outlined by Chief Executive
Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year.
Mr. Barr made the request in an open letter signed by his
British and Australian counterparts that was published Friday. The
letter asks the company to delay the encryption plan until it
figures out a way to provide government access to the services for
investigative purposes.
"Companies cannot operate with impunity where lives and the
safety of our children is at stake, and if Mr. Zuckerberg really
has a credible plan to protect Facebook's more than two billion
users it's time he let us know what it is," Mr. Barr's letter
says.
Mr. Zuckerberg, at an internal town hall late Thursday, said the
challenges encryption poses to law enforcement were akin to
"fighting that battle at least with a hand tied behind your back."
But he reiterated that he believes the benefits of encryption in
strengthening privacy outweigh the drawbacks.
Mr. Barr also signed an agreement with the U.K. that would make
it quicker for British police to request data from internet
companies by circumventing the Justice Department and going to
firms directly.
Mr. Barr's salvo reignites a long-running dispute between
technology companies and law enforcement over encrypted
communications. In 2016, the Justice Department filed suit,
requesting access to the encrypted iPhone of San Bernardino,
Calif., shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. Apple Inc. pushed back, and the
suit was dropped when investigators used another method to obtain
access to the phone.
The federal government has avoided additional high-profile
disputes with the technology industry over encryption since then,
but Mr. Barr's letter represents a new effort against a Silicon
Valley giant. It comes at a time when there is increased regulatory
scrutiny of Facebook and other technology companies.
Despite the Justice Department's push, there remains no
indication that Republican or Democratic lawmakers are interested
in pursuing legislation to require tech companies to allow some
form of government access to encrypted communications.
The prospect of a looming clash over encryption follows a fresh
spate of setbacks for the company, which earlier Thursday lost a
European Union court decision that gave judges broader power to
order the removal of Facebook posts.
On Wednesday, the Journal reported that a Facebook-led coalition
to build a global cryptocurrency-based payments network is starting
to fray. Along with the encrypted-messaging push, libra is part of
Mr. Zuckerberg's plan to move Facebook away from its almost
complete dependence on targeted advertising on public
platforms.
The tech industry has increasingly used encryption technology to
protect the privacy of electronic communications after former
National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden released
documents detailing U.S. government surveillance programs in
2013.
Encryption uses mathematical techniques to scramble digital
files so that they are unreadable by anyone who doesn't have the
digital keys required to unlock them. It is the technique that is
used to protect data on Apple's iPhone and its iMessage system, and
encryption is at the heart of Facebook's new messaging
ambitions.
Technology companies have long argued that any technique that
would give government access to these encryption systems would
undermine their overall security and could ultimately be misused by
hackers or spy agencies to steal data from consumers.
Even if this type of technique weren't misused, technology
companies would likely face a barrage of requests from spy agencies
and governments looking for information on opponents, critics
said.
"How is Facebook to blindly distinguish what governments are to
be permitted backdoor access to whichever conversations?" said Alec
Muffett, a former Facebook engineer who worked on the company's
encryption technology.
For Facebook, the encryption issue increasingly is at the heart
of its business.
In March, Mr. Zuckerberg outlined a shift in corporate strategy
to focus more on encrypted messaging and small-group chats, which
he cast in part as a response to user demand for greater
privacy.
The company's WhatsApp platform already is encrypted, and Mr.
Zuckerberg said similar capabilities would be added across the
company's other services.
Mr. Zuckerberg has acknowledged that extending encryption to the
users of all Facebook products will come at a cost to user safety.
But he has pledged to attempt to mitigate the harms when possible
and said that, overall, people's ability to communicate privately
must be protected.
At the internal town hall, which was livestreamed, Mr.
Zuckerberg also observed the issue isn't Facebook's alone, saying
that Apple's iMessage is the country's most popular messaging
platform and is also encrypted.
Apple didn't respond to a request for comment.
The letter from Mr. Barr was also signed by Kevin McAleenan,
acting secretary of homeland security, along with U.K. Home
Secretary Priti Patel and Australia's Minister for Home Affairs
Peter Dutton.
The push reflects a strategic pivot for the Justice Department,
which historically sought to highlight how encryption stymied
national security and terrorism investigations. Under Mr. Barr, the
Justice Department has sought instead to emphasize the trouble law
enforcement faces in pursuing child-exploitation cases, according
to people familiar with the matter.
Asked about the messaging shift Thursday, a senior Justice
Department official said encryption posed a problem regardless of
the type of crime.
"My focus is on ensuring the public is safe," the official
said.
Past efforts to find a compromise -- such as installing
algorithmic filters on the front end of the WhatsApp -- have been
rejected by Facebook.
"We would not pursue this approach," Facebook Vice President
Will Cathcart wrote to Harvard University adjunct lecturer Bruce
Schneier in August, describing it as both technologically
problematic and vulnerable to government manipulation. Mr. Schneier
had written that he believed Facebook was pursuing that
approach.
The U.S. has a close intelligence-sharing relationship with the
U.K. and Australia -- as well as with Canada and New Zealand --
known as the Five Eyes. The English-speaking countries also
cooperate closely on law enforcement matters, and for years have
wrestled with how to collectively confront increasingly pervasive
encryption technology.
BuzzFeed News reported Mr. Barr's letter Thursday.
Mr. Barr and FBI Director Chris Wray are among several senior
government officials scheduled to speak at a summit Friday about
the challenges faced by law enforcement due to encryption,
particularly as it relates to child exploitation.
At the news briefing, another senior Justice Department official
said the administration wasn't ready to discuss specific
legislative proposals.
There are steps that both sides of the encryption debate could
take to reach compromise, said Alex Stamos, Facebook's former chief
security officer. Facebook, for example, could use machine learning
or new identification technology to spot exploitative messages sent
within its encrypted systems.
That might weaken encryption, but it could address
law-enforcement concerns without giving governments unfettered
access to private information. "This is the start of a negotiation
that our society has to do between privacy and safety," he
said.
Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com and Dustin
Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 04, 2019 06:40 ET (10:40 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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