Home Secretary Amber Rudd will tell Silicon Valley鈥檚 top technology firms that they must do more to combat extremism or face new laws in the UK.
Rudd will meet with representatives of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and other companies at the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism in San Francisco.
She will place a focus on encryption tools in messaging apps such as Facebook鈥檚 Messenger and WhatsApp and Apple鈥檚 iMessage, which make it impossible to access the content without the user鈥檚 permission.
“We support its place in making sure that we have secure facilities in our daily lives,鈥� she said.
“However, there is a problem in terms of the growth of end-to-end encryption. It鈥檚 a problem for the security services and for police who are not, under the normal way, under properly-warranted paths, able to access that information.
鈥淲e want [technology companies] to work more closely with us on end-to-end encryption, so that where there is particular need, where there is targeted need, under warrant, they share more information with us so that we can access it.鈥�
Rudd also wants the Silicon Valley firms to share more metadata 鈥� the circumstances around a message conversation but not the content itself 鈥� with authorities.
The tech giants are expected to oppose these demands on the grounds of protecting privacy. They wrote in a joint statement that they will discuss ways to 鈥渟ubstantially disrupt terrorists’ ability to use the internet in furthering their causes, while also respecting human rights鈥�.
Speaking about the appearance of terror-related literature on services such as YouTube, she told the BBC: 鈥淸Technology companies] have to make sure the material terrorists want to put up, gets taken down. Or even better, doesn鈥檛 go up in the first place.
鈥淲hat they have been saying to us is that, by using artificial intelligence, they鈥檙e beginning to make progress in that way.
鈥淣one of this material should be online. They need to take ownership over making sure it isn鈥檛.
“It鈥檚 governments that need to urge them to really take action so that we don鈥檛 have to go down the road of legislation 鈥� and get them to do it on a voluntary but urgent basis.
鈥淟egislation is always an alternative.鈥�