LONDON: The British government said on Sunday that its security services must have access to encrypted messaging applications such as WhatsApp, as it revealed that the service was used by the man behind the parliament attack.

Khalid Masood, the 52-year-old Briton who killed four people in a rampage in Westminster on Wednesday before being shot dead, reportedly used the Facebook-owned service moments before the assault.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd told Sky News it was “completely unacceptable” that police and security services had not been able to crack the heavily encrypted service. “You can’t have a situation where you have terrorists talking to each other — where this terrorist sent a WhatsApp message — and it can’t be accessed,” she said.

Police said on Saturday they still did not know why Masood, a Muslim convert with a violent criminal past, carried out the attack and that he probably acted alone, despite a claim of responsibility by IS.

“There should be no place for terrorists to hide,” Rudd said in a separate interview with the BBC. “We need to make sure that organisations like WhatsApp — and there are plenty of others like that — don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other.”

She said end-to-end encryption was vital to cyber security, to ensure that business, banking and other transactions were safe — but said it must also be accessible. “It’s not incompatible. You can have a system whereby they can build it so that we can have access to it when it is absolutely necessary,” she told Sky News.

Rudd said she did not yet intend to force the industry’s hand with new legislation, but would meet key players on Thursday to discuss this issue, as well as the “constant battle” against extremist videos posted online.

“The best people — who understand the technology, who understand the necessary hashtags — to stop this stuff even being put up, not just taking it down, are going to be them,” she told the BBC.

WhatsApp said it was working with British authorities investigating the Westminster attack, but did not specify whether it would change its policy on encrypted messaging. “We are horrified at the attack carried out in London earlier this week and are cooperating with law enforcement as they continue their investigations,” a company spokeswoman told AFP.

US authorities last year fought a legal battle with tech giant Apple to get it to unlock a smartphone used by one of the shooters in a terror attack last year in San Bernadino, California. The FBI’s own experts ended up breaking into the device.

New arrest

British police investigating the terror attack on parliament made a new arrest on Sunday as authorities try to piece together the assailant’s motive. A 30-year-old man was arrested in Birmingham on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts, London’s Metropolitan Police said in a statement.

A dozen people have been arrested since the assault on parliament on Wednesday. Nine people have been released without charge, while a 58-year-old man remains in custody and a 32-year-old woman has been released on bail.

Police on Saturday admitted they may never know why Masood chose to drive his hire car into pedestrians before crashing into the fence of the Houses of Parliament and fatally stabbing a policeman. “We must all accept that there is a possibility we will never understand why he did this. That understanding may have died with him,” said senior counter-terrorism officer Neil Basu.

Published in Dawn, March 27th, 2017