UK Gov Says New Home Sec Will Have Powers To Ban End-to-end Encryption (theregister.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: During a committee stage debate in the UK's House of Lords yesterday, the government revealed that the Investigatory Powers Bill will provide any Secretary of State with the ability to force communication service providers (CSPs) to remove or disable end-to-end encryption. Earl Howe, a Minister of State for Defence and the British government's Deputy Leader in the House of Lords, gave the first explicit admission that the new legislation would provide the government with the ability to force CSPs to "develop and maintain a technical capability to remove encryption that has been applied to communications or data".

This power, if applied, would be imposed upon domestic CSPs by the new Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, who was formerly the secretary of state for Energy and Climate Change. Rudd is now only the fifth woman to hold one of the great offices of state in the UK. As she was only appointed on Wednesday evening, she has yet to offer her thoughts on the matter.

Comments

1984

[Anonymous Coward]

Just checked the calendar. It is 1984.

no end-to-end no streaming media

[Anonymous Coward]

So how will things like netflix work without end to end encryption?
Does this mean the end of https and secure transactions?

Looks like, as usual, the politicians do not understand the technology.

Not possible

[SmilingBoy]

If someone like an ISP can remove an encryption, it is not end-to-end encryption in the first place.

Re:My illusions have been shattered

[110010001000]

Stop blaming racism for every decision that voters make you don't like. Idiots.

The power to ban mathematics?

[mark-t]

Because truthfully, that us what they are proposing. The banning of any mathematics where the formulas involved are both unknown and cannot trivially be reverse engineered.