Report: U.S. to Sign Treaty Forcing Platforms Like Facebook to Share Encrypted Chats With UK Police

#News(Security) [ via IoTGroup ]

Headings…

Report: U.S. to Sign Treaty Forcing Platforms Like Facebook to Share Encryp

Auto extracted Text……

The U.S. and UK governments are expected to sign a treaty in October that will force social media platforms based in either of the countries to “disclose encrypted messages from suspected terrorists, paedophiles and other serious criminals” to police in the other, according to the Times of London.
Police in either country have restricted ability to demand user data from a tech company based in the other.
The Times reported that UK Home Secretary Priti Patel is slated to soon sign the “data access agreement,” which follows four years of “intense lobbying” by the UK to gain more direct access to data held on U.S. platforms like Facebook and its subsidiary WhatsApp.
According to the paper, Patel said UK authorities’ hands are currently tied by arrangements that keep transnational data-sharing to emergencies and a slow-moving treaty process:
The police and prosecutors can also request data under the “mutual legal assistance” treaty but the process is highly bureaucratic and can take up to two years.
Under the new treaty, the police, prosecutors and the security services can submit requests for information to a judge, magistrate or “other independent authority”.
The U.S. won’t be able to use data obtained from companies based in the UK in death penalty cases unless UK authorities have explicitly given permission to do so.
It’s not clear whether the proposed arrangement actually requires companies to build backdoors into their encrypted products, something that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been demanding for years, but which has been resisted by tech firms.
As Engadget noted, instead of mandating backdoors, the arrangement may instead create an awkward situation in which companies are forced to turn over data that is “effectively unusable” because it cannot be decrypted

Read More..
AutoTextExtraction by Working BoT using SmartNews 1.0299999999 Build 26 Aug 2019