> The legislation contains what critics have called “a spy clause.” It requires companies to remove child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) material or terro

> The legislation contains what critics have called “a spy clause.” It requires companies to remove child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) material or terrorist content from online platforms “whether communicated publicly or privately.” As applied to encrypted messaging, that means either encryption must be removed to allow content scanning or scanning must occur prior to encryption. This is not accurate. The “spy clause” (section 110) allows Ofcom to issue notices, if it is “necessary and proportionate” to do so, which could have that effect. In deciding what is “necessary and proportionate” Ofcom is specifically required to consider things like “the kind of service it is,” “the extent to which the use of the specified technology would or might result in interference with users' right to freedom of expression” and “whether the use of any less intrusive measures than the specified technology would be likely to achieve a significant reduction in the amount of relevant content” (section 112). This decision can be legally challenged. The difference is important. Every country has a system that allows police to legally break into your home and search it – if a legal authority decides that it is necessary and appropriate. Whether such powers are abused depends not only on the text of the law, which is often as vague and open to interpretation as the Fourth Amendment, but also on the prevailing culture of the government and its judicial and law enforcement bodies. That’s why Signal’s president acknowledges that they are responding to a hypothetical. While she won’t speculate on the probabilities, there are precedents which inform us about the probability that a democratic government would use these powers to break a popular secure messaging system over the reasoned objection of its users and developers. This law could achieve its goal of increasing public control over Big Tech’s content moderation policies without being used in that perverse way. Such perverse outcomes have not yet arisen under the controversial Australian laws which generated similar comments from Signal [1] and HN users [2] in 2018. [1]: https://signal.org/blog/setback-in-the-outback/ https://signal.org/blog/setback-in-the-outback/ [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18636076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18636076