interview Police can complain all they want about strong end-to-end encryption making their jobs harder, but it doesn't matter because the technology is here and won't go away.
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That's what Robin Wilton, head of internet trust at the Internet Society, told us when we recently spoke about the state of E2EE in light of Europol becoming the latest international law enforcement group to call on regulators and tech giants to abandon the practice. It's a lively chat, which you can watch in full below.
Strong end-to-end encryption (E2EE) is the practice of encrypting messages and other information between two endpoints so that even the provider of that encryption, and the carriers that transmit the data, cannot snoop and read the contents. Law enforcement claims this leaves them unable to shut down serious crime – from human trafficking and drug smuggling, to the production of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) – because investigators cannot intercept and view people's communications.
"If you look back to around 2015 and look at the proliferation of available end-to-end encrypted messaging services and apps since then … somehow the number of arrests for illegal images should have dropped off a cliff," Wilton said. "But it hasn't. It's pretty much been constant."
