After last week’s summit in Australia, the Five-Eyes Governments, which include the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, issued a statement calling on the technology industry to willingly provide access to encrypted information.
While encryption is by far the safest way for private information to travel between the sender and receiver, the Five-Eyes group argue that it can also be “used by criminals, including child sex offenders, terrorists and organized crime groups to frustrate investigations and avoid detection and prosecution.” Even though the debate of privacy versus security when it comes to data encryption is not a new one, many cybersecurity experts still claim that there is no safe way to provide authorities with a backdoor access to decoded information without introducing vulnerabilities that may be exploited by hackers.
Despite this argument, the alliance is pushing technology providers to “create customized solutions, tailored to their individual system architectures that are capable of meeting lawful access requirements.” The failure to comply with such requests may result in Five-Eyes pursuing “technological, enforcement, legislative or other measures to achieve lawful access solutions.”
