【Watch The Silencing Online】

WhatsApp and Watch The Silencing Onlinethe government of the United Kingdom are in a battle over the future of encryption, and there doesn't seem to be a clean resolution in sight.

WhatsApp refused a UK government request to create some kind of limited access for officials to read requested messages, Sky Newsreported on Tuesday. But the UK could soon try to force WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) to comply. The Investigatory Powers Act, passed last year, gives the government legal authority to compel tech companies to hand over information the government says it needs, including words contained in supposedly encrypted messages. Though this hasn't been implemented, cryptographers said it seems the two sides are in talks about how to move forward.

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"What you're seeing here is evidence of WhatsApp pushing hard against giving access," said Danny O'Brien, the international director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I think they have to be commended for actually pushing back against this kind of request."

WhatsApp distinguishes itself from many other messaging apps because its encryption prevents prying eyes from reading the messages you send and receive -- unlike, for example, Facebook Messenger. The UK wants access to some of those messages on demand, because officials say such access is necessary when tracking extremists.

"At the end of the day, WhatsApp, they may face a choice, right, of doing what the UK government says or pulling out of the UK entirely," said Matt Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

That may sound dramatic, but WhatsApp may be forced to determine whether it's better for the company to cut their losses in the UK while maintaining the integrity of their product elsewhere. At the same time, it must consider that conceding in the UK opens the door for similar legislation in other nations such as Australia (more on that later).

But between the options of "stay and fight" and "cut our losses" lies a third for WhatsApp: Lie to customers.

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In theory, O'Brien said WhatsApp could turn off encryption for a set of numbers requested by UK officials. They could also put out an "update" for certain numbers that, once downloaded, gave officials access to otherwise encrypted messages.

But O'Brien and others can't see how doing such a thing benefits WhatsApp in the long run, and a WhatsApp spokesperson said "there's no way to build a secret backdoor."

Once a company lies to its customers, a level of trust is gone, and it wouldn't be shocking to see a mass exodus from an app that users now distrust. Even if WhatsApp eventually decides to eliminate encryption in the UK, experts said being transparent with users about that decision would likely result in a much milder exodus than being outed in a lie.

Of course, WhatsApp's issues may not end at the borders of the UK. The Australian government, for example, is looking to the UK to see how this fight plays out, and may design its own surveillance laws accordingly should the UK effectively railroad encryption. The United States, too, has had intermittent battles with tech companies unwilling to compromise the security of their tools on behalf of government officials. While Green doesn't believe the UK alone can change the nature of WhatsApp, he thinks a group of countries might be able to.

And yet these countries also don't want to be labeled as the ones that killed secure communication. Few things say "authoritarian" like the need to access your citizens' communications whenever you deem it necessary, and many tech companies may shy away from doing business in such a country in the future.

The UK may also be concerned about the legality of their own demand to access encrypted messages. Riana Pfefferkorn, a cryptography policy fellow at Stanford University, said she sees a legal battle coming if the UK continues to force the issue, but she doesn't necessarily think the UK wants that fight.

If courts determine that the Investigatory Powers Act is too broad, the public defeat in their fight against encryption would be a lot for the UK to overcome. Instead, Pfefferkorn said the government might just try hacking for the information they want, a power that the IP Act also allows.

"There are other avenues they can take to try to achieve the same end," she said.

Whatever happens, don't expect it to be the last time a tech company battles a government over the integrity of encryption.

"This is in many ways the test case, the petri dish, for safety communications anywhere," O'Brien said.

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