No Absolute Right to Privacy: Security Chiefs Call on Big Tech to Put the Brakes on Encryption

Australia’s top domestic spy chief and police commissioner will call on Big Tech to slow down the roll-out of more advanced encryption, encouraging tech firms to help counter online extremism. In an upcoming address at the National Press Club in Canberra, Mike Burgess, the director-general of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO and the equivalent of the FBI) will warn that comprehensive end-to-end encryption on messaging apps will hamper criminal investigations. Multiple messaging apps and websites, like WhatsApp, Signal, and ProtonMail, employ encryption to protect information sent by one user to another—it involves scrambling the data, sending it, and then for the authorised party to unscramble it upon receipt....