Why is this an "open letter" instead of being passed as law? I understand that you might write an open letter when you are powerless to change something, but this is a government...
Because they want to pretend it's ok to have zero encryption and that's much harder if facebook and others say it's not.
Because passing an actual law to actually ban it would take effort and they're lazy
Because there is a non-zero chance they can't really ban it, at least not without banning a lot of other things like e-commerce and online banking, so a gentlemans' agreement to keep 95% vulnerable is much more manageable.
Because in at least some of the jurisdictions it might not be legal ("constitutional" in the US, "in accordance with the European convention on human rights" in the UK etc) to force these things by law.
Your comment is partially correct, it is the Home Secretaries, past and present, who have been routinely told by the civil servants to tow the anti-encryption line, which goes back to RIPA 2000 and even further back. In essence it is GCHQ who are asking and they understand encryption perfectly well; since they can't ask directly, hence the role falls upon the relevant minister in government to do it.
This will once again become a hot-button issue as outlined in the Queen's speech. The Tory Party is also switching from Whatsapp to Signal ─ make of that, what you will.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/former_gchq_wades_i...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/17/tories-swit...
A Conservative spokesperson said the real justification for their MPs to use Signal was operational, rather than for security reasons. With so many Tory MPs elected at the last election, it had become impossible to fit them all in a single WhatsApp group, because they are currently capped at 256 members.
I wondered if telegram has some feature where you get an alert if someone screenshots the window (I seem to remember snap chat had this?). Do you know?
† A parade is an assembly of some sort; it may or may not involve a march past or route march.
Please note that I'm not supporting the govts position - just supporting their methodology of not rushing to legislate.
Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 was an example. The Government had just written a law (in 1959) clearly saying you mustn't publish obscene stuff. As a generality this seemed very supportable. In the specifics it struggled, was this novel obscene merely because it was about fucking? Because it used words that would be familiar to readers, such as "fuck" and "cunt" precisely because they were words about fucking? The government made its case but jurors concluded the publisher was not guilty. If obscenity meant anything, it apparently did not include literature about fucking. The government gave up and no similar trials were conducted.
The thing about End-to-end encryption is that you can't see inside. So your test case ends up being we weren't able to see inside this message, we want to know what's inside it. And in the course of the trial the jury are likely to discover that either the contents of the message were in fact mundane and uninteresting or that nobody in fact can prove beyond a reasonable doubt what they were anyway, whereupon all the exciting stories about terrorists or shadowy figures preying on children evaporates and the question is just: Is it right that the government wants to pry into everything you do? And a jury is going to say "No".
The idea of an independent judiciary sounded good in the UK, and so they actually built one‡, but they didn't get the memo from America that the independence is supposed to be a thin pretence - so the judiciary actually is independent and they can't trivially unwind that (though leaving the EU will mean at least nobody can tell them not to try any more).
‡ For many years the courts of England & Wales were independent from the British Government but they didn't look it because the ultimate court of appeal actually worked out of the Palace of Westminster where the Parliament is, and its judges were technically "Lords" in the Parliament, so it _looked_ superficially as though there was no separation. All the actual independence was a matter of convention rather than being visible. This appearance was fixed by giving them a new name (the "Supreme Court") and a Supreme Court building, a short distance away from the Palace so now they look as independent as they actually were anyway.
Good luck with that. /s
Go and ask that, you'd be surprised.
Look at me, I can write a technically true but biased question too!
Why "to catch terrorists"? There are lots of crimes and even civil matters for which this is useful.
government will archive and index everything you ever write, film and record to search for evidence of:
Watching illegal movies, Smoking weed, Not paying all your taxes, Antisocial behaviour, crossing a red light?
By convention governments set aside a small amount of time for measures from individual MPs, most of which will be debated but proceed no further if they're at all controversial. A lot of such business will be scheduled for Friday, this way almost everybody can go home. The Speaker (or whichever deputy has to stay on Friday) will claim to hear dissent after a bill is discussed before it can pass, and because there seems to be dissent the house must be divided in order to count supporters for each side of the matter. In doing so it will be "discovered" that it is inquorate (ie there aren't enough members present) and nothing is done.