Another day, another law enforcement agency counter-intuitively makes the epitome of security – namely, strong encryption – one of its targets.
It’s not exactly a first for EU’s Europol, but Executive Director Catherine De Bolle obviously thinks the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting is where the plans to pressure tech companies to introduce encryption backdoors will resonate well.
It is in Davos that De Bolle plans to meet with participating representatives of tech companies, to try to once again drive home the notion that failure to undermine encryption is tantamount to “risking threatening European democracy.”
She shared all this with big legacy media ahead of the meetings, no doubt as a way to prepare ground for “renewed pressure,” as FT described the initiative.
Meanwhile, encryption backdoors of one type or another are euphemistically referred to as “unlocking encrypted messages” for the police to access.
De Bolle does herself no favors when she goes for the old and badly thought-through analogy of, “We need the key to the house when we know there is a criminal inside.”
The problem with this is that once the keys to your house are out of your hands, anyone can duplicate and use them.
It seems that entities like Europol (EU) don’t care much if their hunger to expand mass surveillance to encrypted personal messages also takes down not only people’s privacy but the security of their internet presence overall, including online transactions.
“Anonymity is not a fundamental right,” declares De Bolle – but breaking the internet allegedly to make investigators’ lives easier apparently is a “fundamental right.”
Here’s another pearl from the Europol chief: unless the police can access data on end-to-end encrypted platforms, “You will not be able to enforce democracy.”
So far, tech companies big and small have resisted attempts to have “democracy enforced” on them in this manner, understanding the fundamental significance of encryption to their users, but also the online economy, and the online ecosystem.
And as the legacy media repeatedly paint resistance to anti-encryption measures are only a privacy issue, it is worth repeating as well, that it is of key importance for every internet user’s overall security.
