It’s unusual, and alarming, to see soldiers in key sites such as London’s Downing Street. But their presence on Britain’s streets will probably not be the most striking aspect of the U.K. government’s post-Manchester security crackdown. What will likely have a far greater long-term effect is the acceleration of proposed laws to give British security forces unprecedented access to monitor citizens’ internet use—above all, their use of encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp. It is believed that the Manchester attacker sent a WhatsApp message shortly before Tuesday’s attack. On Tuesday, government sources told the Sun newspaper that, in the event of a Conservative Party victory in Britain’s June 8 election, they would push through powers granting security services the right to hack encrypted messages within weeks.
The attack has certainly stepped up calls to tighten digital surveillance, but Britain’s current government has had end-to-end encryption in its sights for a while. Last year, Theresa May, then Britain’s Home Secretary, introduced the controversial Investigatory Powers Act, which grants government agencies the right to amass large quantities of personal data, including medical and tax records, on a level unknown elsewhere in Europe. As revelations from Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed, British security services had in fact been collecting and retaining this kind of data illegally for some time. The Investigatory Powers Act made this data collection legal, a move that Britain’s Open Rights Group damned as “more suited to a dictatorship than a democracy,” Snowden himself called it “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.” [...]
There’s no clear evidence, however, that the transformation of Britain into a vast surveillance post would necessarily thwart further attacks. Terrorists are nothing if not adaptable. As numerous security experts have noted, they could easily switch to other communication systems, or revert to ones already used in the past. The perpetrators of the 2015 Paris attacks communicated via unencrypted SMS messages. Security forces failed to prevent the assault not because the attackers’ communications were inaccessible, but because Belgian security officials short on highly trained staff failed to communicate with their colleagues.
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