The Austrian government has joined a growing list of authorities in countries around the world actively looking for ways to mandate the inclusion of encryption backdoors in messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, that offer secure communications.
The anti-encryption trend continues, despite both technology experts and privacy advocates consistently warning that encryption cannot be broken in a way that gives access only to “the good guys” like governments and law enforcement while keeping malicious actors out.
But when he earlier this week spoke about a draft law meant to enable surveillance of previously private communications on encrypted apps, Austria’s Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (OVP) stuck to the regularly repeated narrative about the police needing access as a matter of “leveling the playing field” while combating “terrorists and extremists.”
The latter definition seems to cover persons found to be engaged in “constitution-threatening activities.”
Despite this fairly broad definition, Karner ventured to predict that the police would not be using the proposed, significant new powers other than to investigate “a few individual cases a year.”
Without going into how he arrived at this number – or how such a thing could be predicted at all unless it was simply a bid to minimize the opposition to such schemes – the minister went on to state that law enforcement would limit its new spying abilities to cases of suspected preparation of a terrorist attack, formation of a terrorist groups – and, “it can also be used for espionage,” said Karner.
Meanwhile, he promised that “the population is not affected by this.”
That is – the population must trust the government and its law enforcement agencies not to at any point abuse the power to access and read their messages, for undemocratic purposes like mass surveillance.
Although such fears are perfectly reasonable, Karner’s coalition partner State Secretary Jorg Leichtfried (SPO) dismissed them, professing himself as “not seeing any danger of mass surveillance” stemming from the draft law.
Instead of going into the details of why that may be so, Leichtfried proceeded to tell “the population” how it should feel, in effect asking for blind trust.
“The population should have the feeling that the country is becoming safer,” this official is quoted as saying.
The third partner in the ruling coalition, NEOS, is not entirely on board, however.
But Karner thinks the other two parties will manage to “convince” NEOS, during the draft’s “long review period of eight weeks.”
