Chat Control May Finally Be Dead: European Court Rules That Weakening Encryption Is Illegal
Chat Control May Finally Be Dead: European Court Rules That Weakening Encryption Is Illegal
In a legal blow, it looks like Chat Control may not roll out client-side scanning. A huge win for privacy advocates!
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!
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It's still funny how that almost stereotypical harmless clueless kind of Europeans (trusting into making everything safe with more laws) somehow got to actually making laws, and those laws do seem like made not by clueless, but rather quite malicious people.
For once, it seems like the right people were involved in this resolution.
What the court says is a pretty standard opinion in cybersecurity, you can't have "safe backdoors". We could have had some lobbying bullshit like the usual but this time the common sense won.
ECHR is not the EU, is not affiliated with the EU, and ultimately we'll see if the EU cares.
So no competent people managed to shoot down that law inside EU institutions until this decision by a court which is not EU.
AFAIK every member of EU is also member of ECHR, so even if EU doesn't care, each member does.
States often ignore their obligations. As I said, we'll see, EU member states usually are more modest in this regard.
there is no "stereotypical European". It's not even a federation like U.S.
Consider the differences between somebody from California and Texas. And now, consider the differences between somebody from Hungary and Holland or Greece and Germany.
Not even a common language!
After Brexit there's no justification for speaking English yet they mostly communicate in English.
After Brexit there's no justification for speaking English yet they mostly communicate in English.
Republic of Ireland is still an EU member, so the EU is still obligated to treat it as an EU language.
Also, the EU is quite rational and english isn't going anywhere even if Ireland bailed since it's the lowest common denominator as far as foreign languages go.
a) why won't the Irish too stop using "the lowest common denominator" and speak, you know, Irish?
b) i guess Irish is one of the official languages of the EU because of Lithuania?
c) thanks for pointing out the obvious
d) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhlenberg_legend
e) none of the above
I kinda intuitively excluded Hungary, Poland, Greece etc and imagined sporty grannies talking about regulating IT.
Hungary is the exclusion.
Poland is back in and Greece in EU was never in that reactionary, backward group.
Greece in EU was never in that reactionary, backward group.
So why'd you say that? Doesn't click with anything I meant, if that's not clear, and you are not reading my thoughts.