LAS VEGAS - The Electronic Frontier Foundation and a coalition of partners urged a court to protect default encrypted messaging and children's privacy and security in a brief filed today.
The brief by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Nevada, the EFF, Stanford Internet Observatory Research Scholar Riana Pfefferkorn, and six other organizations asks the court to reject a request by Nevada's attorney general to stop Meta from offering end-to-end encryption by default to Facebook Messenger users under 18 in the state.
The brief was also signed by Access Now, Center for Democracy & Technology, Fight for the Future, Internet Society, Mozilla, and Signal Messenger LLC. Communications are safer when third parties can't listen in on them.
That's why the EFF and others who care about privacy pushed Meta for years to make end-to-end encryption the default option in Messenger.
Meta finally made the change, but Nevada wants to turn back the clock.
As explained in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the EFF and others today, encryption is one of the best ways to reclaim our privacy and security in a digital world full of cyberattacks and security breaches.
It is increasingly being deployed across the internet as a way to protect users and data.
For children and their families especially, encrypted communication is one of the strongest safeguards they have against malicious misuse of their private messages - a safeguard Nevada seeks to deny them.
In its motion to the court, Nevada argues that it is necessary to block end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger because it can impede some criminal investigations involving children.
This ignores that law enforcement can and does conduct investigations involving encrypted messages, which can be reported by users and accessed from either the sender or recipient's devices.
It also ignores law enforcement's use of the tremendous amount of additional information about users that Meta routinely collects.
The brief notes that co-amicus Pfeffercorn recently authored a study that confirmed that Nevada does not need to block encryption to do its investigations.
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Tue, 12 Mar 2024 16:13:06 +0000