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

Re:Welp...

[Zontar The Mindless]

Butthurt is the only reason parent is modded down. Parent is spot on, as any EU resident who's not been in a coma for the last decade or two can tell you.

Seriously. I like Britain and the British just fine (just spent a holiday there, in fact), but to the EU (including this EU national), the UK looks an awfully lot like that spoiled brat who quit the game because he got the rules bent "only" 90% in his favour.