Tech companies and privacy activists are claiming victory after an eleventh-hour concession by the British government in a long-running battle over end-to-end encryption.
The so-called “spy clause” in the UK’s Online Safety Bill, which experts argued would have made end-to-end encryption all but impossible in the country, will no longer be enforced after the government admitted the technology to securely scan encrypted messages for signs of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, without compromising users’ privacy, doesn’t yet exist. Secure messaging services, including WhatsApp and Signal, had threatened to pull out of the UK if the bill was passed.
“It’s absolutely a victory,” says Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation,
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