Now Europe is Looking to Undermine Encryption

[Exterminator]

The European Commission is planning to force technology vendors to undermine end-to-end encryption in products and services to satisfy growing demands from national politicians and headline writers.

EU justice commissioner Vera Jourová said this week that she would give providers “three or four options”, ranging from voluntary measures to legislation.

The outcome will be the same: forcing tech firms to provide a means for law enforcers to access encrypted communications for specific investigations.

However, an issue that surrounds this is whether its possible for a backdoored service to stay secure – and more importantly whether or not the information will find its way into the wrong hands eventually, exposing innocent users and businesses.

“At the moment, prosecutors, judges, also police and law enforcement authorities, are dependent on whether or not providers will voluntarily provide the access and the evidence,” Jourová said, according to Euractiv. “This is not the way we can facilitate and ensure the security of Europeans, being dependent on some voluntary action.”

The decision appears to have been forced by pressure from the likes of the UK, Germany and France. UK home secretary Amber Rudd even went on TV on Sunday arguing the case, despite already having been granted such powers as part of the Snoopers’ Charter.

Attitudes in Europe certainly seem to have hardened, given the reluctance of politicians in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere to force encryption backdoors in the past.

F-Secure security advisor, Andy Patel, claimed encrypted communications have an important role to play in shielding citizens from mass surveillance and protecting activists and journalists from state intrusion.

“If end-to-end encryption were to be banned in one app, people would simply move to another one. Even if it were possible to eradicate all privacy-enabling services, ‘terrorism’ would still exist,” he added.

“Agencies tend to collect too much data and have trouble finding signals amongst all the noise. Even in recent cases, terrorist attacks that could have been tracked and stopped with available data were still missed by authorities. Removing end-to-end encryption would not help solve the noise problem – in fact, it might even make it worse.”

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Google met the home secretary this week to discuss a plan of action to combat terrorism online in the shorter term.

They agreed to “encourage the further development of technical tools to identify and remove terrorist propaganda”, to support information sharing inside the industry and back the efforts of civil society.

However, any mention of encryption was conspicuous by its absence.

“Given that the root causes of ‘terrorism’ are not being addressed (via changes in foreign policy), one has to wonder whether the motives behind banning the use of end-to-end encryption serve a more dystopian agenda,” argued F-Secure’s Patel.

 

[frogboy]

All this is just going way too far IMHO.

 

[In2an3_PpG]

All this is just going way too far IMHO.

And too fast.

 

[Handsome Recluse]

Also saw from Twitter that US over-invests in cyberoffense over defense.

 

[In2an3_PpG]

Also saw from Twitter that US over-invests in cyberoffense over defense.

Their not thinking nor do they care for their actions.

 

[Handsome Recluse]

Their not thinking nor do they care for their actions.

90%/10% If I'm correct.
I said over-invest because they said so. Over-invest probably pertains to the big difference rather than actual tactical benefits of the investments.
It's clear though that they're serious about cyberoffense whether they're using technology or policies to do it.
Genuine reasons they do this are hard to know but this could easily be a way to trample people's rights even if the majority of the policy makers don't believe it is the case. Add this to the fact of other alternatives to attain this and the lack of empirical evidence and the social sciences just plain sucking and never improving, this can become really confusing since virtually everything outside technology becomes unreliable because of the lack of evidence+malicious motives+propaganda+noise. It doesn't help though that public experts are worse at predicting than chance which is discussed in Freakonomics and Broken Science. So add unreliability of experts to that.

 

[Tony Cole]

Thank god we've enacted article 50 the EU tries to control everything

 

[Andytay70]

R I P Privacy.

Time to use a VPN.

Thank god we've enacted article 50 the EU tries to control everything

Do you honestly think the British government wont do the same amd say "Its to prevent Terrorism"!!

 

[Myriad]

If you are lucky enough to have an older installation of a good quality encryption app you should hold on to it ,
and never update it , ever !
The software technology is well evolved , so updating is pointless and you only risk getting a back-doored version in future .

The end of TrueCrypt is shrouded in mystery ,and we will probably never know the full story ,
but I bet a dollar to a donut that they were put into a tight spot , just like Lavabit , and that they chose to walk away ,
rather than bend over .

For those that don't have an encryption app , and think they might need one in future , you should get it right now ,
and choose very carefully if you are offered a choice of mirror sites ,
and never update it.

But that's just my two chetrum worth , as usual

 

[Tony Cole]

I will give my full opinion if you honestly think MI5, MI6, GCHQ, FBI, NSA and the CIA sit and read the billions of emails sent daily, weekly then no. If you cannot see the terrorists there will be another 9/11. London bombings, 7/7 when will you guys realize, if another 9/11 happened people would be up in arms. Edward Snowden and the idiot Julian Assange have drove these sick deprived people they now know how to communicate in plain site. Both should be shot.

 

[_CyberGhosT_]

Their not thinking nor do they care for their actions.

It must be contagious, because the US suffers from the same from of ignorance

 

[Marko :)]

That must be an early 1st april joke.