This week, the U.K. government launched an unprecedented and deceptive effort to kill off end-to-end encryption. They’ve hired a fancy ad agency to convince people that encrypted messages are dangerous to children.
The explicit goal of the “No Place to Hide” campaign, launched on Tuesday, is to prevent Facebook from expanding its use of end-to-end encryption. Currently, Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging system uses end-to-end encryption, but other communications systems, including Facebook Messenger, are scanned and checked against a US government database, run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which identifies child abuse images.