We know that governments on both sides of the Atlantic hate encryption.
Last month, Attorney General William Barr he warned that the use of end-to-end encryption, "allows criminals to operate with impunity, hiding their activities under an impenetrable cloak of secrecy."
Similarly, the new UK home secretary Priti Patel criticized recently the use of end-to-end encryption on services messaging like Facebook's WhatsApp.
"When systems are deliberately designed using end-to-end encryption that prevents any form of access to the content, regardless of the crimes they may allow, we must intervene," he said.
"This is not an abstract discussion: Facebook's recently announced plan to implement end-to-end encryption across all messaging platforms presents significant challenges that we need to work on in solidarity to address them," Patel added.
Patel did not say how the government would act, other than asking Facebook and other tech companies to "urgently work through detailed discussions."
Governments, however, have increasingly asked technology companies in recent years to abandon encryption, to no avail.
The UK government, for example, already has all the powers it needs to require technology companies to remove encryption from their messaging services.
According to the disputed law on investigation passed in 2016, the government may require technology companies to remove "electronic protection" (encryption) from messages in serious cases.
In reality, however, this legal power is very limited, which is why the UK Government has not used it.
First, many of the biggest messaging companies are based in the US, which means they don't worry too much about what politicians think in a foreign Buy.
Second, these companies are increasingly reporting security, which is usually backed by a commitment to encryption as part of their marketing.
This is of course because consumers are increasingly aware of the benefits of safety. Offering encryption by technology companies has become a competitive advantage.
This trend makes it much more difficult for technology companies to compromise on encryption: no company wants to have a reputation for collaborating with government and giving access to private data. Also, if you do not trust a technology company anymore (we do not say names), then the knowledge that he can not read your messages can make you feel a little more comfortable.
Beyond that there is the purely technical issue: Messaging companies have designed their systems to work with end-to-end encryption. Breaking this model at the behest of a government would be extremely costly and would weaken security for all users worldwide.
An alternative, of course, is to provide a separate, less secure service in some states, which is avoided.
Tech companies receive requests from many countries with different regimes who want to monitor their customers' communications. Some do, some don't – but if "liberal" democracies start insisting on getting that data, it's very hard for a tech company to refuse to make data available to repressive regimes.
Stopping the use of end-to-end encryption would require very strict laws not only in the UK but also in the US and Europe.
Such a coordinated effort is somewhat unlikely, because there is resistance from those who use encrypted services. So whoever imposes some new legislation will have the corresponding cost.
Will have;
Those who do not want to be monitored should react. There do not seem to be elegant solutions to this problem.
We live in an age unprecedented in the erosion of privacy. We have smartphones that can indicate where we are and what we do in a number of companies in real time. We have filled our homes with cameras and microphones. We use face recognition systems, fingerprint recognition systems, and then discuss our privacy.
Encryption is one of the few forms of protection we have left.
We are in the golden age of surveillance with the state and companies having the full picture of our lives. The only battle we have left is to protect the last missing pixels from this image.
