I have a family link to northern Nigeria[1] and so my interest is always piqued when I see it come up for discussion — so then I see it mentioned in parliament by Jim Shannon in the context of privacy & safety:

I will come to the horrific case raised by Theresa Villiers. On 12 May, Deborah Samuel was murdered by her classmates for blasphemy following a message on WhatsApp. She had passed her exams at Shehu Shagari College of Education in Wamako, Sokoto state, and she posted a voice message in a group WhatsApp saying:

“Jesus Christ is the greatest. He helped me pass my exams.”

Deborah was accused of blasphemy and forcibly taken from the security room. While they were trying to take her from the room to a local police station, she was attacked by a mob, stoned to death and burned beyond recognition.

I must say: it’s unwise to say something which will incriminate you in any forum, encrypted or otherwise — and Richard Allan recently made a podcast all about that albeit that he and his co-host were discussing how this would rightly lead to bad people suffering bad consequences, as opposed to the lynching of a second-year student at a Christian college in Nigeria.

But it would be obscene to opine that anyone deserved Deborah’s fate simply just for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong forum; and it’s possible — but foolish — to make the argument that perhaps encryption and privacy enabled the lynching to occur … which is arrant rubbish; no tool can be considered to offer free and open communication and yet subject the smallest celebration of one’s faith and one’s academic success, to chilling if ostensibly protective censorship.

Violence is a phenomenon and in some parts of the world it is a regrettably popular pursuit — again, see [1] for details — and if we look at the trajectory of some distant other parts of Africa, such as Uganda’s totalitarian crackdown on LGBTQ people, we can see that perhaps some governments should not be permitted access to the content of peoples’ messages, lest it result in pogroms and purges.

And yet the EU and the UK are demanding such access for themselves.

It would be good for those parliamentarians to explain now how platforms can/should argue against other Governments making such demands.

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[1] Family stories: Ahmadu Bello, the murdered Sardauna of Sokoto; him and dad were great buddies, and if dad was ever killed in the bush, my sisters (this was before me) were planned to have been adopted by him. The Sardauna loved my mother so much that he had his silversmith make two rings for them from Nigerian silver coins, gave her one, wore the other himself, and had the mould smashed in front of her so there would never be another such ring made. He was assassinated and apparently buried with the ring; the assassination was one of the factors that led to the Nigerian civil war. Mum wore the other ring for the rest of her days. Apparently, being a redhead, she was “blessed”, and I inherited the hair.