The European Union (EU) appears to be actively seeking workarounds around a ruling issued by the European Court of Human Rights concerning end-to-end encryption.
Not even a week had passed since the court announced a ban on weakening this vital element of online security and privacy before the EU announced High-Level Group (HLG) consultations “on access to data for effective law enforcement.”
Opponents from the ranks of privacy advocates among the bloc’s politicians, as well as some rights groups, interpret this as a maneuver to carry on with the plans to undermine encryption and retain data from citizens’ communications.
The EU announcement of HLG’s latest endeavor – the body was first launched back in June – said that the task of the consultations with NGOs is to ascertain what “challenges” law enforcement faces on a daily basis linked to “access to data.”
And then the idea is to find out what to do to “overcome them” – and by “challenges” the EU, according to critics, means end-to-end encryption. “Overcoming” them, on the other hand, would mean introducing software backdoors to fatally weaken the technology’s value.
Equally, groups like EDRI who say they oppose this scenario claim that it is an outcome with “no future in Europe” and are urging members of the European Parliament to “end all attempts to normalize dangerous surveillance practices that rip people off their safety and privacy online.”
At least some of them – notably lawyer and MEP Patrick Breyer of the German Pirate Party agree. Breyer, who keeps a close eye on the goings-on in the EU bureaucracy that could, or does pose a threat to online privacy and safety, refers to HLG as the “EU Going Dark Group.”
According to him, the group needs to be dissolved for setting up what he calls “undemocratic preliminary negotiations” with the aim of enabling blanket data retention across the EU, once encryption of personal data has been weakened.
Previously, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that encryption plays an important role in protecting both individuals and companies from hacker attacks, identity, and data theft, as well as fraud and confidential information disclosure – and for all these reasons, should not be undermined in a general manner as envisaged in Brussels.
