META Meta Platforms Inc

By Robert McMillan, Jeff Horwitz and Dustin Volz 

U.S. Attorney General William Barr is asking Facebook Inc. to hold off on plans to add end-to-end encryption throughout its messaging services, citing public safety in a push to force the social-media giant to delay a major strategic shift outlined by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year.

Mr. Barr is making the request in an open letter also signed by his British and Australian counterparts, set to be published Friday. The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Wall Street Journal, asks the company to delay the encryption plan until it figures out a way to provide government access to the services for investigative purposes.

"Companies cannot operate with impunity where lives and the safety of our children is at stake, and if Mr. Zuckerberg really has a credible plan to protect Facebook's more than two billion users it's time he let us know what it is," Mr. Barr's letter states.

Despite the Justice Department's push, there remains no indication that Republican or Democratic lawmakers are interested in pursuing legislation to require tech companies to allow some form of government access to encrypted communications. Such a proposal appears both politically and technically difficult as various congressional committees have studied the issue and largely agreed there remains no clear way to mandate access without incurring significant overall costs to cybersecurity -- a view shared by most tech companies and security experts.

"We strongly oppose government attempts to build back doors because they would undermine the privacy and security of people everywhere," a Facebook spokesman said Thursday.

Mr. Barr's salvo reignites a long-running dispute between technology companies and law enforcement over encrypted communications. In 2016 the Justice Department filed suit, requesting access to the encrypted iPhone of San Bernardino, Calif., shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. Apple Inc. pushed back against the request, and the suit was eventually dropped when investigators used another method to obtain access to the phone.

The federal government has avoided further high-profile dispute with the technology industry over encryption since then, but Mr. Barr's letter represents a new effort against a Silicon Valley giant. It also comes at a time when there is increased regulatory scrutiny of Facebook and other technology companies.

The letter also was signed by Kevin McAleenan, acting secretary of homeland security, along with U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel and Australia's Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton.

The current push also reflects a strategic pivot for the Justice Department, which historically sought to highlight how encryption stymied national security and terrorism investigations. Under Mr. Barr, the Justice Department has sought instead to emphasize the trouble law enforcement faces in pursuing child-exploitation cases, according to people familiar with the matter.

Asked about the messaging shift on Thursday at a news briefing, a senior Justice Department official said encryption posed a problem regardless of the type of crime. "My focus is on ensuring the public is safe," the official said.

Mr. Zuckerberg in March announced a shift in corporate strategy to focus more on encrypted messaging and small-group chats, which he cast in part as a response to user demand for greater privacy. The company's WhatsApp platform already is encrypted, and Mr. Zuckerberg said similar capabilities would be added across the company's other services.

Mr. Zuckerberg has said that extending encryption to the users of all Facebook products would come at a cost to user safety. But he has pledged to attempt to mitigate the risks when possible and said that, overall, people's ability to communicate privately must be protected.

Privacy advocates worry that if Facebook were to provide any single government access to its encrypted messages, this capability could then be misused by other regimes to track dissidents or political enemies.

Past efforts to find a compromise -- such as installing algorithmic filters on the front end of the WhatsApp -- have been rejected by Facebook.

"We would not pursue this approach," Facebook vice president Will Cathcart wrote to Harvard University adjunct lecturer Bruce Schneier in August, describing it as both technologically problematic and vulnerable to government manipulation. Mr. Schneier had written that he believed Facebook was pursuing that approach.

The U.S. has a close intelligence-sharing relationship with the U.K. and Australia -- as well as with Canada and New Zealand -- known as the Five Eyes. The English-speaking countries also cooperate closely on law enforcement matters, and for years have wrestled with how to collectively confront increasingly pervasive encryption technology.

BuzzFeed News earlier reported on Mr. Barr's letter.

Mr. Barr and FBI Director Chris Wray are among several senior government officials scheduled to speak at a summit Friday about the challenges faced by law enforcement due to encryption, particularly as it relates to child exploitation.

At the news briefing, another senior Justice Department official said the administration wasn't ready to discuss specific legislative proposals.

There are steps that both sides of the encryption debate could take to reach compromise, said Alex Stamos, Facebook's former chief security officer. Facebook, for example, could use machine learning or new identification technology to spot exploitative messages sent within its encrypted systems.

That might weaken encryption, but it could address law-enforcement concerns without giving governments unfettered access to private information. "This is the start of a negotiation that our society has to do between privacy and safety," he said.

Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com and Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 03, 2019 16:36 ET (20:36 GMT)

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