"Be Careful Taking Sides in Mark Zuckerberg vs. William Barr", 04 October 2019

U.S. Attorney General William Barr, joined by his Australian and British counterparts, sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg urging him to abandon plans to deploy strong encryption on all the Facebook-owned messaging services... Facebook intends to spread strong encryption to all of its messaging services in the near future, sealing off Facebook Messenger and Instagram messages from prying eyes (and computers) in the next few years... Security and human rights experts have responded that limiting encryption or allowing “backdoors” through which law enforcement or intelligence agencies could sneak into otherwise secure systems would endanger lives and risk harming vulnerable people... [However] strong encryption limits the ability of services like Facebook and law enforcement agencies from preventing, catching, and punishing those who would sexually abuse children and post video and images of the abuse... Faced with encryption, law enforcement agencies must infiltrate suspect networks or convince suspects to turn over information... [The global scale of Facebook make it] harder for Facebook to patrol its service to filter out noxious content—something the company purports to be committed to doing better in the future... [However, if] Facebook users do less on the regular Facebook News Feed and do more in private groups and via encrypted messages, then Facebook can’t be held responsible for failing to keep its system free of calls for violence, harassment, or hate speech.