Yahoo Finance Britain’s cyber chief attacks ministers over ‘inflammatory’ claims about tech bosses
The founder of Britain’s cyber security agency has hit out at ministers for making “inflammatory” comments about tech bosses as the Government fights to pass new online safety laws.
Ciaran Martin, who set up the National Cyber Security Centre in 2016, criticised security minister Tom Tugendhat for saying Instagram and Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg preferred making “vast profits” instead of caring about children’s online safety.
“A procession of ministers have made inflammatory statements claiming tech executives don’t care about child abuse,” said Mr Martin, who was previously Whitehall’s director of security and intelligence under both Gordon Brown and David Cameron’s governments.
“When you step back and think about it, that is an extremely serious and, to my mind, unsubstantiated accusation to make.”
Mr Tugendhat told a policing conference this week that Big Tech bosses “make vast profits from their youngest users, only to pass the buck when it comes to protecting them from the dangers on their own platform”.
“I am speaking about Meta specifically and Mark Zuckerberg’s choices particularly,” added the security minister, naming the Facebook and Instagram owner’s chief executive.
Describing the minister’s attack as achieving “the opposite of building confidence and trust”, the NCSC founder called for calm as he said tech companies attacking the Government’s flagship Online Safety Bill were mistaken.
“Much of the US and European tech communities think that the British government hates encryption. That’s not true,” said the cybersecurity boss, who served David Cameron’s administration as Cabinet Office constitution director.
“But it’s very much the Government’s fault that that impression has taken hold.”
Critics have said the proposed law will force tech companies to remove end-to-end encryption, a feature used to protect messages against unauthorised snooping.
WhatsApp boss Will Cathcart told The Telegraph in December that the messaging app would pull out of the UK rather than comply with the new law.
Echoing his comments, Signal Messenger president Meredith Whittaker pledged to follow suit and said this week that the Online Safety Bill “would make Britain a global role model for repressive regimes”.
Yet Mr Martin dismissed the comments as he said an “independent regulator” would be in charge of online safety, and not the Government.
He explained that under the Online Safety Bill’s current format, Ofcom would be in charge of deciding whether or not to trigger a key clause giving the state the power to inspect the contents of Britons’ private messages to each other.
Mr Martin - now a professor of government at Oxford University after leaving the NCSC in 2020 - said: “Ministers have implied that there's an easy off-the-shelf solution and that there’s no difficult compromises. Expert consensus strongly rejects this.”
“It's the hard grind of incremental improvement that's likely to be the way forward.”
