News: India is among seven countries to back a UK-led campaign against end-to-end encryption of messages by social media giants such as Facebook.
Facts:
- Which are the seven countries? The UK and India are joined by the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.
- What is the campaign about? The campaign is against the end-to-end encryption of messages by social media giants such as Facebook.The governments have claimed that this feature acts as an obstacle for law enforcement against illegal activities by blocking all access to them.
- Significance: This campaign marks an expansion of the so-called “Five Eyes” group of nations by including India and Japan.
Additional Facts:
- Five Eyes(FVEY): It is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.
- End-to-end encryption(E2EE): It is a system of communication where only the communicating users can read the messages.
- In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers including telecom providers, Internet providers and the provider of communication service from being able to access the cryptographic keys needed to decrypt the conversation.
