UK government still wants to be able to ban encryption

Debates in the UK House of Lords have revealed, according to The Register, that the UK government intends that the Investigatory Powers Bill would give secretaries of states the ability to force communication service providers to ‘develop and maintain a technical capability to remove encryption that has been applied to communications or data’. Earl Howe, Minister of State for Defence explained that, while the government does not intend to ban end-to-end encryption, ‘there will be circumstance where it is reasonably practicable for a company to build in a facility to de-encrypt the contents of communication’.