Isn't it obvious? This has got f-all to do with terrorism. The bad guys have always hidden their communication.
What's getting the security services all riled up is that ordinary law-abiding citizens are suddenly encrypted.
And, of course, there's no way out of this. Either encryption is secure, or it's broken. If it's secure, it's secure for everyone. If it's broken, it's broken for everyone. Now we have open-source encryption methods that are trivial to implement, anyone can build a securely end-to-end encrypted communication system. [1]
The cat's out of the bag, spooks. You can't read people's mail any more. You'll have to find other ways of gathering intelligence.
[1] within reason - clown-like incompetence will always mess up. Or even just ordinary-coder levels of incompetence. But it's still harder than plaintext.
so for the average imbecile just using whatsapp, signal or a self-hosted service would actually make a difference, but if it'd make a difference for law enforcement is a different matter. having access to billions of messages and actually doing something with them are two different kinds of beasts.
Have you not seen Four Lions?
Perhaps if you're referring to home grown Islamic terrorists. However Britain does have a problem with an experienced group of rather professional terrorists called the IRA.
The IRA are and were very different from the Islamic terrorists, who are much less organised and more resemble isolated self-radicalised far right extremists.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_Irish_Republican_Ar...
I don't tend to read the news -- so haven't heard much about Sinn Fein[0] recently, for example. Looking up SF, I've just learned they are left-wing. I'd assumed they were right-wing nationalists.
Guess the answer to how much I know about this subject is, a wee bit.
'Research resulting in the creation of a library of documents providing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism — specifically information regarding the manufacture of explosive substances, the construction of explosive devices, and tactics used by terrorist organisations.'
No, it's not. It's the entirety of the first numbered point (of six) on page 1; all six of the numbered points there, as well as the paragraph leading into the numbered list and all but the last two paragraphs of page 2 address Count 1. Count 2 is addressed in the penultimate paragraph of page 2, and Count 3 is addressed in the final paragraph of page 2, which carries over onto page 3. The remainder of the document is not recounting the offenses but discussing other sentencing factors.
There are only 3 counts (as stated at the very beginning of the document), so even if the beginning of the discussion of each count weren't explicitly marked in a parenthetical, it would be easy to see that the numbers of the six-item numbered list could not be count numbers.
The relevant legislation is here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/11/section/5
Guess I'll just concede: assigning a reasonable probability of you being correct.
Home grown terrorists may be different, but they are already consistently detected by regular police work long before they act.
This movement was triggered by spying. But it is also because encryption is mostly free nowadays, while a couple of decades ago it was almost too expensive to use anywhere. Thus you can also view the causality starting with technology improvement, and that all the encryption demand was there, latent, with the spying only perturbing things a little and unleashing a chain reaction.
What surprises me about this argument, is that their stance is that terrorists are accidentally starting to use encryption. So, by consequence, that in the past terrorists simply did not bother with encryption?
In that case, I wonder whether the terrorists have been triggered by the simplicity of current day cryptography, or simply by the knowledge that the governments are always listening in on everything everyone is saying.
It seems to me that someone started an arms-race, be it government or terrorists, and both are willing to cause massive amounts of collateral damage in order to keep one-upping the other.