The EU Court ruled that “Backdoors may also be exploited by criminal networks and would seriously compromise the security of all users’ electronic communications. The Court takes note of the dangers of restricting encryption described by many experts in the field.” Any requirement to build in backdoors to encryption protocols for law enforcement agencies could also be taken advantage of by malicious actors.
The EU Court of Human Rights’ also builds on their acknowledgment that “mass surveillance does not appear to have contributed to the prevention of terrorist attacks, contrary to earlier assertions made by senior intelligence officials.”
As the EU Commision’s Chat Control Bill directly targets undermining secure end-to-end encryption, it now looks to be in trouble. In its current version, the Chat Control bill would require the scanning of content on your personal devices, including that which is sent via end-to-end encrypted messenger apps or encrypted email. At some point, providers would be required to either break this encryption to allow the scanning of content or scan content once it has been decrypted and is readable.
On February 13th, Europe received an early Valentine’s gift from the European Court of Human rights when they banned any laws that aims to weaken end-to-end encryption. This ruling is a major stumbling block for the EU Chat Control Bill, but does it really mean that Chat Control is dead? There are many reasons why Chat Control should never become law, we’ve collected the turn of events and steps you can take to help prevent this dangerous bill from ever being passed!
I hope it takes a few years until the next attempt. Unfortunately the enemies of privacy and other civil rights are very enduring in their attempts.
It remains worrying that so many politicians are happy to jump in front of that wagon and pull it under some pretense of wanting to fight crime. You don’t need to be tech literate to understand that hiding a key under the rug opens your door to criminals just as much as it opens it to law enforcement.
The enemy of privacy and civil liberties is “very enduring” because the enemy is surveillance capitalism — oligarchs/corporations who own our politicians and have virtually-limitless funding.
It will surely be more attempts, but this is huge and means you’ll always have the hability to have an encrypted service like signal which was the big danger here