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By Joseph Menn, Christopher Bing and Katie Paul
WASHINGTON, Oct 3 (Reuters) – The United States and alliesare seizing on Facebook Inc’s plan to apply end-to-endencryption across its messaging services to press for majorchanges to a practice long opposed by law enforcement, saying ithinders the fight against child abuse and terrorism.
The United States, the United Kingdom and Australia plan tosign a special data agreement on Thursday that would fast trackrequests from law enforcement to technology companies forinformation about the communications of terrorists and childpredators, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.
The agreement will be announced alongside an open letter toFacebook and its Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, calling on thecompany to suspend plans related to developing end-to-endencryption technology across its messaging services.
Child predators have increasingly used messagingapplications, including Facebook’s Messenger, to exchangeexplicit images and videos.
Speaking at an event in Washington on Wednesday, AssociateAttorney General Sujit Raman said the National Center forMissing and Exploited Children received more than 18 milliontips of online child sex abuse last year, over 90% of them fromFacebook.
He estimated that up to 75% of those tips would “go dark” ifsocial media companies like Facebook were to go through withencryption plans.
In practice, the bilateral agreement would empower the UKgovernment to directly request data from U.S. tech companies,which remotely store data relevant to their own ongoing criminalinvestigations, rather than asking for it via U.S. lawenforcement officials.
The effort represents a two-pronged approach by the UnitedStates and its allies to pressure private technology companieswhile making information sharing about criminal investigationsfaster.
A representative for the U.S. Department of Justice declinedto comment.
The letter addressed to Zuckerberg and Facebook comes fromU.S. Attorney General William Barr, UK Secretary of State forthe Home Department Priti Patel and Australian Minister of HomeAffairs Peter Dutton.
“Our understanding is that much of this activity, which iscritical to protecting children and fighting terrorism, will nolonger be possible if Facebook implements its proposals asplanned,” the letter reads.
“Unfortunately, Facebook has not committed to address ourserious concerns about the impact its proposals could have onprotecting our most vulnerable citizens.”
WhatsApp’s global head Will Cathcart wrote in a publicinternet forum https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21100588 onSaturday that the company “will always oppose governmentattempts to build backdoors because they would weaken thesecurity of everyone who uses WhatsApp including governmentsthemselves.”
That app, which is already encrypted, is also owned byFacebook.(Reporting by Joseph Menn and Katie Paul in San Francisco andChristopher Bing in Washington; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)