It’s only been a day since British Prime Minister David Cameron announced his intention to try and ban encrypted messaging apps such as Snapchat and WhatsApp in the United Kingdom, but the internet has already exploded with a mixture of mockery and outrage. Now Mr. Cameron looks to be trying to distance himself from those comments, claiming that they had been “misinterpreted”.
U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has been weathering a Twitter storm of mockery for comments he made yesterday in which he appeared to suggest it would be the intention of a future Conservative government to ban strong encryption. “Are we going to allow a means of communication between people which even in extremis, with a signed warrant from the Home Secretary personally, that we cannot read?” he said in a public speech. “No we must not. The first duty of any government is to keep our country and our people safe.” Internet security experts chipped in en masse on social media to point out the pyrrhic folly of Cameron thinking he can ban encryption, while others noted the heightened hypocrisy of a politician using last week’s terror attacks in Paris as a foil to attempt to undermine citizens’ digital privacy rights at home.
