The British Prime Minister said Monday that the U.K. Government would ban encrypted apps after the next U.K. General Election in May unless security services were given backdoor access to spy on users.

David Cameron, in what is surprisingly not an April Fools Day joke, cited the recent terrorist attacks in Paris as his raison d’etre.

“The attacks in Paris demonstrated the scale of the threat that we face and the need to have robust powers through our intelligence and security agencies in order to keep our people safe,” Cameron said while on the hustings.

“Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read?” he added. “My answer to that question is: ‘No, we must not.'”

A world without privacy is dystopia. We must be able to travel, purchase, and communicate beyond the gaze of the state’s all-seeing eye.

— DHH (@dhh) January 12, 2015

Cameron did not specify which apps his Government would ban, but apps likely to face the chop across the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Norther Ireland include highly popular chat applications such as Snapchat and WhatsApp.

The New York Times noted that “any restriction on these online services…would not take effect until 2016…and it remained unclear how the British government could stop people from using these apps, which are used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.”

Cameron, who hypocritically marched in support of free speech in Paris Sunday despite his Government jailing people for tweets, has a long history in failing to support the right to privacy.

Outside of the United Kingdom it could be asked “could it happen here?” but the truth is that as we know from the leaks of Edward Snowden it already is; banning encrypted apps is just another nail in the coffin of freedom from the tyranny of the state.

photo credit: onlinejones via photopin cc