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<p>The UK Government supports strong encryption, which is a vital part of our digital
economy, but we have been clear that technology companies should not deliberately
design out their ability, and that of law enforcement agencies, to access content,
even to prevent and detect the most serious crimes such as child sexual exploitation
and abuse and terrorism. As the Director General of MI5, Sir Andrew Parker, made clear
last week, lawful access to encrypted communications is a vital part of keeping our
citizens safe.</p><p>This is not just about one company. It is about protecting the
public across the globe as technology develops. However, as we have made very clear,
we are extremely concerned about Facebook’s current proposals to apply end-to-end
encryption across their messaging services. The US National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children (NCMEC) estimates that these proposals would result in the loss
of 12 million reports related to child abuse every year. The UK National Crime Agency
(NCA) estimates that, in 2018, NCMEC reporting from Facebook will have resulted in
more than 2500 arrests by UK law enforcement and almost 3000 children safeguarded
in the UK.</p><p>In order to make progress on this issue, we have been consistently
clear that industry must be willing to engage in detailed, technical consultation
with governments that can have a genuine impact on their design decisions and that
is what the Home Secretary called for from Facebook in an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg
on 4 October last year.</p><p>We believe that this sort of engagement is necessary
in order to identify potential solutions that can keep the public safe, without undermining
cyber security or individuals’ privacy. We recently set out our approach to this issue
in a testimony to Congress, clearly, factually and in significant detail, dispelling
myths that prevent proper debate. We would encourage anyone who is interested in our
position to read it in full <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-letter-to-mark-zuckerberg"
target="_blank">https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-letter-to-mark-zuckerberg</a></p>
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