[ih] Orders from the Top: The EU’s Timetable for Dismantling End-to-End Encryption

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

EXCERPT:

The last few months have seen a steady
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-bill-governments-not-so-secret-plan-scan-every-message-online>
 stream <https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6955493/OLL20597.pdf> of
proposals, encouraged by the advocacy of the FBI and Department of Justice,
to provide “lawful access” to end-to-end encrypted services in the United
States. Now lobbying has moved from the U.S., where Congress has been
largely paralyzed by the nation’s polarization problems, to the European
Union—where advocates for anti-encryption laws hope to have a smoother
ride. A series of leaked documents from the EU’s highest institutions show
a blueprint for how they intend to make that happen, with the apparent
intention of presenting anti-encryption law to the European Parliament
within the next year.

The public signs of this shift in the EU—which until now has been largely
supportive toward privacy-protecting technologies like end-to-end
encryption—began in June with a speech by Ylva Johansson, the EU’s
Commissioner for Home Affairs.

Speaking at a webinar
<https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2019-2024/johansson/announcements/speech-commissioner-johansson-webinar-preventing-and-combating-child-sexual-abuse-exploitation_en>
on
“Preventing and combating child sexual abuse [and] exploitation”, Johansson
called for a “technical solution” to what she described as the “problem” of
encryption, and announced that her office had initiated “a special group of
experts from academia, government, civil society and business to find ways
of detecting and reporting encrypted child sexual abuse material.”

The subsequent report was subsequently leaked to Politico
<https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/SKM_C45820090717470-1_new.pdf>.
It includes a laundry list of tortuous ways to achieve the impossible:
allowing government access to encrypted data, without somehow breaking
encryption...

[...]
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/orders-top-eus-timetable-dismantling-end-end-encryption

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True