Today, we join Nevada in its efforts to stop child predators, criminal organizations, foreign countries, and others from making it easier to obtain children’s personal information.
Nevada seems to believe that children don’t have much protection online. In a misguided attempt to “protect” children, Nevada is seeking an injunction to prevent Meta from implementing the strongest online protection available: end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Default Facebook messenger for kids.
This action does not protect children. Instead, if allowed, weaken The protection children have online. Messages that children send to parents and friends can be intercepted by predators and others. All shared photos, videos, audio, and other content can be intercepted by criminals, looters, and other attackers.
Nevada seems to believe that weakening this protection is necessary for law enforcement, but as we have said for years. There is no way only Allow law enforcement to access your messages. “Backdoors” and other cryptographic vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers.
Submission of court documents
On March 20, the District Court in Clark County, Nevada will hold a hearing on the state’s request to prevent Meta from providing the highest level of protection for children’s communications. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and cryptography researcher and advocate Liana Pfefferkorn jointly prepared a court brief filed today. provided information to the court about why granting this request would harm the child rather than protect it. And he emphasized how essential encryption is to everyone’s safety online.
We at the Internet Society signed this amicus brief, along with Access Now, Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), Fight For The Future, Mozilla Corporation, and Signal Messenger LLC.
E2EE is already the default for other messaging applications
End-to-end encryption, as per the amicus brief is already the default In other messaging systems. WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, has been using his E2EE as default since 2016. Apple’s iMessage has been using E2EE by default since 2011. Google’s Messenger uses E2EE by default between Android users, and other messaging apps like Signal have been using E2EE for years. Facebook Messenger itself has been offering the option to use E2EE since 2016, and just at the end of last year it started enabling E2EE as the default.
Encryption, especially end-to-end encryption, is one of the best tools you have for protecting your communications and information online. We are joining our colleagues at all other organizations in asking the Clark County District Court to protect Nevada children by making their communications secure by default and unable to be intercepted. .
See also:
Learn more about our amicus program, which aims to give the internet a voice in court.
