The controversial online security law will be significantly weakened. Is the UK throwing in the towel with this?

The UK House of Commons met again last night to debate the Online Safety Bill again. With this bill, the UK government wants to ensure police services can read our chat conversations by removing end-to-end encryption. The law has been fiercely challenged for blatantly infringing on citizens’ privacy. The Financial Times writes that it will not happen that quickly because the draft law did not emerge from the meeting unscathed.

Stephen Parkinson, the minister responsible for (digital) media, said in black and white during the meeting that regulator Ofcon could only require message scanning if it was “technically possible” and with technology that “meets minimum accuracy standards “. ‘ . This one sentence actually takes all the teeth out of the law.

At least one quantum computer is needed to crack current encryption standards. In the literal sense, the law can only be enforced if a company offering communication services has a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. If this is not the case, Ofcon may not require companies to provide insight into user traffic, but may only ask companies to “do their best to find a solution”.

A Pyrrhic victory

For technology companies, the decision is celebrated as a victory. Chat services like WhatsApp encrypt your message traffic so that only the recipient(s) of the message can see it. Opponents of the law argued that removing encryption also endangers the privacy of “good citizens”.

The UK government, on the other hand, used a time-tested tactic to justify the law, as we have analyzed at length: think of the children. Encryption enables the spread of child pornography, so encryption is bad by definition in any context. Terrorists could also be caught more quickly without encryption. If you have nothing to hide, isn’t it a problem that the government occasionally reads?

In Westminster, common sense seems to prevail, although it’s still too early to uncork the champagne. Experts tell The Register that the government will only put the hatchet aside for a while but certainly won’t bury it for good. The hot potato is passed to the next legislature, while the current one washes its hands in innocence. The question is what will happen when cracking the encryption becomes “technically possible”.