Home Secretary Amber Rudd focussed on Internet policy issues in her speech to the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester. The Home Secretary reiterated her demands for Internet platforms to do more to combat terrorism and child abuse.
Rudd announced plans to tighten terrorism laws to criminalise merely viewing terrorist content, as opposed to keeping a copy found on the Internet, as well as new legislation to criminalise publishing information about the police or armed forces for the purposes of preparing an action of terrorism.Internet companies, however, will be most directly concerned with the Home Secretaries demands directly of them.
“But it is not just Government who has a role here. In the aftermath of the Westminster Bridge attack, I called the internet companies together. Companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft. I asked them what they could do, to go further and faster.
They answered by forming an international forum to counter terrorism. This is good progress, and I attended their inaugural meeting in the West Coast.
These companies have transformed our lives in recent years with advances in technology.
Now I address them directly. I call on you with urgency, to bring forward technology solutions to rid your platforms of this vile terrorist material that plays such a key role in radicalisation.
Act now. Honour your moral obligations.”
— Home Secretary Amber Rudd
The Home Secretary announced that the government would be funding Project Arachnid, web-crawler software developed by the Canadian child protection Cybertipline, designed to search out child abuse imagery online.
“It is software that crawls, spider-like across the web, identifying images of child sexual abuse, and getting them taken down, at an unprecedented rate.
Our investment will also enable internet companies to proactively search for, and destroy, illegal images in their systems. We want them to start using it as soon as they can.
Our question to them will be ‘if not, why not’. And I will demand very clear answers.”
— Amber Rudd
Rudd also doubled down on previous attacks on end-to-end encryption in person-to-person messaging software
“But we also know that end to end encryption services like Whatsapp, are being used by paedophiles. I do not accept it is right that companies should allow them and other criminals to operate beyond the reach of law enforcement.”
— Amber Rudd
Speaking earlier at a conference fringe event, she hit back at critics who accuse her of fighting a war against mathematics, saying
“I don’t need to understand how encrpytion works”,
— Amber Rudd
And accusing tech experts of “patronising” and “sneering” at politicians who want to regulate technology.
