UK's Rudd under fire over demands to lift message encryption
Updated : 14:17
UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd was under fire from tech firms and cyber security experts on Monday over her demand that encryption be removed from social media messages after last week's London terror attack.
Rudd said it was “completely unacceptable” that the government could not look at messages on applications such as Whatsapp.
However, former MoD cyber security chief Major General Jonathan Shaw said the government was trying to "use the moment" to influence debate over greater snooping powers in its favour.
"I think there’s a lot of politics at play here,” he told the BBC.
"There’s a debate in parliament about the whole 'snooper’s charter' and the rights of the state and I think what they are trying to do is use this moment to nudge the debate more in their line."
British-born Muslim convert Khalid Masood mowed down and killed three people on Westminster Bridge last Wednesday before going on to stab a policeman to death. He was shot inside the Carriage Gate of parliament.
Born Adrian Ajao, Masood sent a final message using the the app, owned by Facebook, just before he started his 82 second journey of carnage. There is no way of decrypting the message, even by WhatsApp itself.
Rudd was aggressive in her stance towards the tech industry.
"We need to make sure organisations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other,” Rudd told the BBC.
"In this situation we need to make sure our intelligence services have the ability to get into situations like encrypted WhatsApp."
Ministers have invited industry representatives to a meeting on Thursday to discuss the matter, along with the presence of extremist content on Facebook and Google.
Google was criticised last week for allowing advertisements on its YouTube unit to appear alongside extremist messages. The UK government and big advertisers such as the BBC and Transport for London have pulled their spending as a result.