Attacks on encryption continue. The UK government has just reportedly handed Apple a Technical Capability Notice – effectively demanding that Apple allow UK law enforcement access to their users’ encrypted cloud servers. This is the latest in a series of recent pushes by the UK Government and security services to establish backdoors in the end-to-end encrypted services which underpin a great deal of our lives. It is also happening at a time when many of us are really quite scared of the things that governments – particularly the new US administration -might do with backdoor access to Internet platforms. Undermining the security of these services would also hand further power to the companies who provide these platforms to access this data themselves.
This directly threatens the privacy of Apple’s users – and the safety of many of those who might now be targeted for retribution or enforcement. GCHQ has generally argued that there are useful technical work-arounds that can provide access to legitimate authorities to help with law enforcement. The UK government has particularly used the genuine issue of mass-scale online gender-based violence, particularly the exploitation of children, to make the case for mass-scale surveillance of the Internet in order to detect this violence and arrest those culpable.
The government argument here is that encryption and anonymity provide a safe haven for online abusers – they stop investigations, frustrate prosecutions, and form a major blocker to tackling misogynistic violence. I disagree. I’m going to leave the well-rehearsed technical arguments about whether it is feasible to weaken encryption for the government but not for hostile actors to one side for now (spoiler: it isn’t), and focus on the substantive policy area of gender based violence itself.
In fact, the blocker to successful prosecution of gender-based crime has rarely been a lack of leads and forensic evidence, but of frontline resource and of the actual relationship that police have with many of the groups of people reporting harm. Police and courts can’t remotely cope with the volume of gender-based crime that they already have prosecutable evidence on. Huge amounts of online grooming and harassment is done on regular social media platforms, often with no OPSEC whatsoever and sometimes under the person’s own named account, and a colossal amount of violence against women and children is reported to the police with no follow-up or no eventual CJS response. A great deal more remains unreported, often because victim/survivors do not trust the police or do not wish to be forced to relive the events in court.
Where extensive digital collection is involved in crime against women and children it’s as likely to be used by police to discredit the survivors (especially for those in particularly vulnerable groups who aren’t ‘ideal victims’) as to establish a case against those committing the harm. A concrete example of this can be seen in some of the controversies around the use of digital forensics on mobile devices by Police Scotland. Similarly, the narrative around grooming gangs in the UK has been retconned into being about police ‘political correctness’ and a lack of willingness to investigate Pakistani men. Aside from the ways that these arguments have been used to appeal to racist ideas of two tier policing, this has in fact been a way of letting the authorities off the hook for not believing young, vulnerable women who were often understood by police as troublesome, living ‘chaotic’ lives and hence not being credible.
Labour does seem to genuinely want to take serious policy action against misogynistic violence and violence against children. Several Labour cabinet ministers – most notably in this case, the Safeguarding Minister, Jess Philips – have argued for an explicitly feminist approach to justice and security policy. A feminist policy argument against weakening encryption might well be that this just another example of replacing the controlling and abusive behaviour of bad men with surveillance and control of women and children by the nominally ‘good’ men in the police and security services; with the police in particular having serious issues with violence and misogyny themselves. I’d argue as well that it’s particularly likely to materially harm the most vulnerable women and children in society – who are generally targets of police enforcement rather than protection – and further diminish trust in the police by the groups who already have least trust in them, and who are the least likely to report when they are victimised or groomed.
There is currently an understandable backlash against privacy in some quarters that might have previously defended it. Privacy has been co-opted by the techno-libertarian right – framed as a battle against the state, against regulation, and against institutions and communal goods. It’s often understood now as exclusively something relating to technology, relating to data, and relating to individual rights against state control. As many of us are increasingly desperate for intervention in the enormous social problems facing our societies, for radical change, for building communities, and for repairing social institutions, a concept associated with the crypto bros and techno-libertarians wreaking havoc on the world might seem unattractive.
Privacy – as the legal scholars Ellen and Mack said in 1991 – was “born not of woman, but of man” – and feminists have long railed against the liberal or libertarian idea of privacy as defending the right of the patriarch to control his household – and the women and children in it – without state interference. There is plenty of evidence for this – for example, police historically ruled sexual violence and domestic violence ‘in the home’ as a private, not a police matter, explicitly using the language of privacy. Attempts by the state to protect women and children have often been assertions of patriarchal power, and have often involved surveillance and control of women deemed deviant by the rest of society.
Privacy is ultimately about how we negotiate and maintain the boundaries of different spaces of social power. Fights over how these boundaries are drawn – whether around communities, or publics, or individuals, whether from a feminist, or liberal, or radical, or right-wing lens – are ultimately fights over different worlds of privacy. A feminist, radical privacy – one which tries to empower, and fight for the rights of women and children – is at the heart of much contemporary feminist activism; these movements have a greater claim to own ‘privacy’ as a concept than the alleged libertarians breaking into US Treasury records or scamming the public with NFTs and ‘shitcoins’. Communities of colour similarly have a strong claim as experiencing the worst excesses of state and private surveillance; they too should have a greater ownership of ‘privacy’ as a concept than a wealthy white 19-year old who doesn’t want to pay tax. Some of the big emerging battles of feminist activism under Trump 2.0 are going to need strong privacy tools or revolve around strong claims for a feminist, Black, or queer privacy – for access to abortion, activists communicating and organising, and for wider legal and procedural rights, such as the right of survivors of sexual violence not to be named publicly.
(Postscript: None of these arguments are new – they’ve been made by activists both in and out of the tech space for decades. For more recent writing on radical forms of feminist or other activist privacies and tech, I can recommend the work of Sarah Myers West, Sarah Jamie Lewis’ book Queer Privacy or my own book, Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy among many others. There is also a long history of black scholarship on privacy – some of these perspectives can be found in Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology – and scholarship on Muslim experiences of surveillance, inc. more recent work by Quarashi, Heath-Kelly and others on privacy and the Prevent Duty in the UK . And – for those interested in how trustworthy law enforcement might be when provided with our data – I note Alice Hutching’s recent finding that 56% of UK prosecutions for cybercrime offences (including under CMA) in the first half of 2024 were of serving police officers and police staff.)