UK home secretary Amber Rudd is heading to Silicon Valley to meet senior executives from social media and internet companies in a bid to force them to do more to counter the spread of terrorist content online.
The rhetoric from UK lawmakers over the past year, especially those in the Conservative Party, has ratcheted up after each new terror attack.
Prime Minister Theresa May has called for greater regulation of the web so that there are no “safe spaces” for terrorists to hide, claiming that she wants the UK to be a "global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet".
Rudd herself took to the airwaves after the Westminster Bridge terror attack to argue that “organizations like WhatsApp” shouldn’t be able to “provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other”.
Her remarks were widely criticized by the Ministry of Defence’s former cybersecurity boss, major general Jonathan Shaw; former Met police deputy assistant commissioner, Brian Paddick; and Open Rights Group executive director, Jim Killock, who branded Rudd’s words “cheap rhetoric”.
Now she is taking the fight to the heart of Silicon Valley where she hopes to meet up with tech execs on the sidelines of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism in San Francisco.
Although the rhetoric over forcing providers to engineer backdoors into their end-to-end encryption services has been absent of late, there have been repeated calls for social networks to take down terror content more quickly.
A statement sent to Reuters had the following words from Rudd:
"Terrorists and extremists have sought to misuse your platforms to spread their hateful messages. This Forum is a crucial way to start turning the tide. The responsibility for tackling this threat at every level lies with both governments and with industry. We have a shared interest: we want to protect our citizens and keep the free and open internet we all love."
However, thus far it appears as if she only has a meeting planned with YouTube, if the report is accurate.
Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg was on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs program over the weekend, during which she defended her company’s stance on end-to-end encryption.
She argued that Facebook/WhatsApp hands over comms metadata to investigators with legitimate requests, but if the firm was forced to undermine encryption by creating backdoors, terrorists would migrate to platforms in non-regulated parts of the world, resulting in no intelligence for law enforcers at all.