As part of REPHRAIN’s commitment to inform responsible policy and legislation, Professor Awais Rashid, the Director of REPHRAIN, spoke to BBC’s Newsnight on Tuesday’s programme to discuss the privacy harms of the provision to scan end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messages in the Online Safety Bill.

REPHRAIN has previously provided the expertise of the Centre’s researchers as independent evaluators for the Safety Tech Challenge Fund’s prototypes for client-side scanning prior to encryption. The evaluation concluded that, from a Human Rights perspective, the confidentiality of the E2EE service users’ communications cannot be guaranteed when all content intended to be sent privately within the E2EE service is monitored pre-encryption.

In his conversation with the BBC, Professor Rashid highlighted the impact on fundamental human rights noting that “this would be the equivalent of us all moving around having a surveillance camera attached to ourselves”. He also noted such a provision would mean that “the UK seriously risks losing its position as one of the leading places for security and privacy”. Earlier this year, UK’s broader cyber security community issued an open letter (signed by many members of REPHRAIN) to the UK Parliament to consider the scientific evidence available to them before voting on the Online Safety Bill.

You can watch the Newsnight report and Professor Rashid’s interview here, (26:34 mins), read the REPHRAIN Safety Tech Challenge Fund Evaluation Report here and the open letter from the community here.