While most of the tech convos are surrounding privacy – one minister in UK decided that privacy is not a strong enough justification for having encryption on chat messaging.

According to Reuters, British interior minister Amber Rudd said that tech companies should be working with law enforcement agencies and not offer a “secret place for terrorists to communicate”.

This comment was made after UK saw a attack take place in Westminster, where four people were killed after the attacker ploughed his car into pedestrians and stabbed a police officer in an attempt to get into parliament. It was revealed that British-born Khalid Masood sent an encrypted message moments before he carried out the attack.

“It is completely unacceptable, there should be no place for terrorists to hide. We need to make sure organisations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other.” Rudd said. “We need to make sure that our intelligence services have the ability to get into situations like encrypted WhatsApp.”

Encryption and privacy has been a much discussed topic as US government has been trying to work with tech companies to provide a way around encryption, after several instances of mass attacks happening in the country. At current time, end-to-end encryption on many popular messaging platforms means messages can only be decoded by the recipient and not by anyone in between, including the company providing the service.

Rudd seems to think that this situation is different from what the US counterparts are arguing for.

“This is something completely different. We’re not saying open up, we don’t want to go into the Cloud, we don’t want to do all sorts of things like that,” she said. “But we do want them to recognize that they have a responsibility to engage with government, to engage with law enforcement agencies when there is a terrorist situation.”

She said she wanted to see an industry-wide board set up in Britain to allow technology companies to better police their sites and stop letting “their sites, their platforms, their publishing enterprises … being used by terrorists”.

Despite those comments, Reuters talked to Brian Paddick, a home affairs spokesman for the opposition Liberal Democrats and former deputy assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan Police, said the security services could view “the content of suspected terrorists’ encrypted messages”.

“The real question is, could lives have been saved in London last week if end-to-end encryption had been banned? All the evidence suggests that the answer is no.”