In the aftermath of the Westminster terror attack last month Amber Rudd, the Tory Home Secretary, took to the airwaves to insist that government intelligence services should be allowed to read people’s WhatsApp messages. In true Orwellian style, the Tories are using this attack as an excuse to strip away our civil liberties.
In the aftermath of the Westminster terror attack last month Amber Rudd, the Tory Home Secretary, took to the airwaves to insist that government intelligence services should be allowed to read people’s WhatsApp messages. In true Orwellian style, the Tories are using this attack as an excuse to strip away our civil liberties.
The attacker apparently sent a WhatsApp message just moments before he drove over pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and then stabbed a policeman outside Parliament. But after an investigation in which the police presumably checked the attacker’s phone and read whatever messages he’d been sending, the police have repeatedly insisted that the attacker wasn’t working with anyone else. It seems, then, that this WhatsApp message had nothing whatsoever to do with the attack.
This hasn’t stopped Amber Rudd from demanding more powers for the government to spy on its own citizens, even after these powers were already massively extended just recently, when Theresa May herself was Home Secretary. Rudd wants WhatsApp messages decrypted and easily accessible for government spies.
Thanks to the recent changes to privacy laws, the government is already legally allowed to hack into people’s phones and read their messages, including WhatsApp messages, if they’re suspected of terrorist activity. The fact is that the government doesn’t need access to decrypted WhatsApp messages in order to “fight terrorism” – rather, the State wants to keep tabs on law-abiding people who are increasingly angry with the Tory government and the British Establishment.
It doesn’t help that Rudd clearly has no clue what she’s talking about. She attacks end-to-end encryption, of the kind WhatsApp uses to secure its messages, but she doesn’t realise that this technology is also used in online banking transactions and other secure services that people use every day. If you ban end-to-end encryption, you put all kinds of other secure transactions at risk.
This isn’t even the worst of it. Rudd also said that, as well as spying on people’s WhatsApp messages, the government wants to consult with people who “understand the necessary hashtags” to prevent terrorism. The Home Secretary is the minister responsible for overseeing the work of the government’s cyber-security experts, but she doesn’t seem to have any understanding of Twitter – one of the largest social media outlets on the internet. I’m sure we can all sleep soundly now, secure in the knowledge that Amber Rudd is getting to grips with the “necessary hashtags” to keep us safe.
The mixture of cynicism and stupidity that motivated Rudd to make such statements in the wake of the Westminster attack tells us something about the mentality of the representatives of the ruling class. Specifically, it tells us that a bosses’ government will use the slightest pretext, no matter how absurd, to increase the surveillance powers of the capitalist State.
Tory policies are making people’s lives worse year on year. The Establishment can feel people’s anger, and the corresponding politicisation, brewing beneath them and they want as many tools as possible to try and prevent that sentiment exploding to the surface.
They have every right to be worried – and we have every right to fight back.
