Facebook accused of giving ‘free pass’ to terrorists

Ken McCallum has claimed that social media giant Facebook is giving a ‘free pass’ to terrorists by planning to end-to-end encryption.

Speaking to Times Radio, the head of M15 warned that the plans by Facebook’s chief Mark Zuckerberg would enable terrorists to plot attacks without being visible to the security services.

He said that if you have end-to-end default encryption ‘with absolutely no means of unwrapping that encryption’ you are effectively giving terrorists ‘a free pass where they know that nobody can see into what they are doing in those private living rooms’.

Deflecting claims of building a ‘surveillance state’, McCallum highlighted the need for rare cases, such as when a secretary of state and a judge has agreed that access to that information is necessary and proportionate, that the security services ‘need the companies to have built a means for us to work in partnership with them to access the content of those communications’.