It really is amazing to me that anyone thinks it's reasonable policy to ban end-to-end encryption. For the sake of national security, I would want to strengthen the security of digital data, not weaken it.
Also, EU is far more advanced in terms of invisible security so, they don't want to lose the tools which enable them to do it.
We need to re-think security and people are lazy about it because, it's hard.
Edit: My English gets a hit when I'm low on caffeine, hmm...
Europe has a philosophy of "feeling peaceful". Police, intelligence, surveillance, etc. is not done openly, on your face. Instead it flows just beneath the surface.
There are a lot of civilian officers around and police officers are not very visible. Same for borders and higher security places like airports.
If there's something suspicious happening, the concentration is increased invisibly. If something really happens, the area is silently surrounded like a python death hugs its prey, and it's over.
This is possible with intelligence and surveillance, communications sniffing, etc. If you increase encryption, there's a risk of blinding security services. You may need more overt operations are much more manpower to keep tabs on everything.
I'm an encryption proponent. I support it with all my being. Also, I'm aware that being able to see everything can and is being abused.
However, I need to be a realist here: We're addressing the wrong problem here. Is encryption required? Undebatably yes. Do everyone has a right to privacy? Undebatably yes. Do we want to be secure and need security services? Possibly yes.
So, we need to solve the problem of security with the presence of encryption. I.E. Security in a past-encryption era. The no-encryption ship has sailed. Trying to bring it back with the force of law is a last ditch effort. We need another solution to allow security services to their job with the presence of encryption, and without weakening it.
I do not accept someone can just read my office messages or conversations with my family just because somebody may be trying to make a bomb or planning an uprising.
https://www.routledge.com/Handbook-of-Surveillance-Technolog...
Consider this section from the resolution:
Striking a right balance
The principle of security through encryption and security despite encryption must be upheld in its entirety. The European Union continues to support strong encryption. Encryption is an anchor of confidence in digitalisation and in protection of fundamental rights and should be promoted and developed.
Protecting the privacy and security of communications through encryption and at the same time upholding the possibility for competent authorities in the area of security and criminal justice to lawfully access relevant data for legitimate, clearly defined purposes in fighting serious and/or organized crimes and terrorism, including in the digital world, and upholding the rule of law, are extremely important. Any actions taken have to balance these interests carefully against the principles of necessity, proportionality and subsidiarity.
Whoever wrote: "at the same time upholding the possibility for competent authorities in the area of security and criminal justice to lawfully access relevant data for legitimate, clearly defined purposes in fighting serious and/or organized crimes and terrorism, including in the digital world, and upholding the rule of law, are extremely important".
Either said person doesn't understand end-to-end encryption, or they don't want end-to-end encryption but mere encryption, with keys shared here and there...
Either way I don't understand how the text you pasted intends to "strike the balance" when e2ee is present. Either they're talking about backdoors or they're in fantasyland
>Technical solutions for gaining access to encrypted data must comply with...
They do say:
>there should be no single prescribed technical solution to provide access to encrypted data.
But it's perfectly clear the assumption is that they intend law enforcement to have access to all encrypted data, given the various caveats about doing so legally.
They do mention privacy, but all that means is not making user data public. They make no mention of a right to maintain data private from the government or law enforcement.
I am not arguing that this is desirable, but I do acknowledge that investigators may need help to navigate modern technology.
> Technical solutions for gaining access to encrypted data must comply withthe principles of legality, transparency, necessity and proportionalityincluding protection of personal data by design and by default.
Or they are so painfully incompetent that they don't understand that it is much better if one cannot figure out that some military officer or energy sector/government employee has a lover since such person could be blackmailed by foreign intelligence.
Apparently they don't get that those pesky terrorists can encrypt message by themselves in thousands of ways. Internet is full of information how to do this.
Not saying this is a good idea, though.
Also: We know how CSS, BluRay Master Keys, TSA Keys and other various signing keys fared in the wild.
Note that banning E2EE implies banning encrypted p2p communications entirely. E2EE is a concept that applies only to centralized comms providers where all messages go through a server.
Practically speaking, it's impossible to ban every encrypted protocol (TLS, SSH, ...). It's also (probably) impossible to ban IP communications that don't have an "approved server" participating.
However, comms providers / social networks to date at least manage, authenticate, and introduce users at the serverside. Fully distributed projects have problems with spam. So governments would have to ban comms providers from "allowing" their clients to talk to each other directly and not via the backend. That's a hefty technological restriction, which would block a wide range of protocols (webrtc/SIP, torrents, probably a bunch of other Very Important things I'm not thinking of right now).
Some examples are the code signing keys of most major desktop and mobile operating system vendors, the package signing keys of major Linux distributions, the SSL private keys of most banks and major e-commerce sites, and the certificate signing keys of most SSL certificate issuers.
It’s unreasonable to believe only the government will have access.
Just like it was impossible for the Titanic to sink.
Include privacy or civil rights civilian organizations among the shareholders, such as the ACLU, so that there is an outside check.
If you choose a sufficient and diverse enough set of shareholders, you can reduce the chances that someone could compromise or coerce enough of them to gain access to the government key to less than 1 in N, where N is arbitrarily large. Chose N so that this is less likely than simply brute forcing the key.
Instead we'd see 'ongoing' authorizations on the level of an investigation, a person or team, or a whole sub-organization (modulo clearance / position in that organization). And so you'd have copies of the complete key going around.
But getting Congress (or whatever is equivalent outside the US) to pass an E2E+G law that allows it to be done in such a way seems unlikely. They will go for a way that allows broad use.
[1] You could make it a per-device key, generated on the device itself. The device makes the Shamir secret sharing shares, encrypts them with the public keys of the shareholders, and periodically includes those includes those in the chat metadata.
To decrypt a chat, the government needs to record it, get the encrypted shares out of the chat metadata, get each shareholder to use that shareholder's private key to decrypt their share and then contribute that share for recovery of the actual chat key for that chat.
If they want to decrypt a chat from another device, they'd have to do that all over again for that device.
Of course I want to preserve my privacy.
But I get it that law enforcement wants to be able to look into communications. Let's say they find a terrorist (I'm close to Brussels, so not a hypothetical scenario here). Best case you want to see which phones they have, and look into all their communication to get an idea about their contacts etc.
It's a very hard problem, and I'm not sure which one I would pick.
But right now, it's pretty easy to use end-to-end encrypted forms of communication, so why still use sms?
Knowing the suspects and having limited resources, seems to me a argument for listening into communication, not an argument against it.
Listening to more communications is exactly a resource problem: it isn't exactly cheap to build and maintain the infrastructure to gather and analyze more. Moreover in the context of the link, while I'm not a fan of conversations being listened on by default, I certainly don't want resources be spent so that encryption can be reduced
What we have is that one government, lets call it the States of Merica, funds & trains freedom fighters in a country called Lyria. Sometime after this Lyria is thrown into huge & devastating civil war against the regime where the opposing terrorist forms a new entity, the Salami State.
The civil war results in massive refugee crisis. Refugees flees north into the big trade union called Äuropean Club, ÄC. ÄC happens to be allied with States of Merica. Terrorists from the Salami State infiltrates the refugees and travels to ÄC where they commit a horrific terrorist attack in the capital city of Sirap. President of the States of Merica is chocked by these horrible news and pledges to help it's friends in the ÄC.
This leads the ÄC to adopt surveillance measures to track any potential terrorist. To its help it uses the knowhow and infrastructure from their close friends States of Merica (obviously).
When the civil war in Lyria nears it end and the Salami State is almost defeated, suddenly the winning Lyrian regime commits a gas attack on innocent civilians in a Salami State stronghold. ÄC and States of Merica condemns the gas attack and bombs the Lyrian regime as punishment. The freedom fighters rejoice because they now can fight for freedom a few more years.
The Salami State still exists and continue to get help from somewhere, unknown by whom, and commits more terrorist attacks in ÄC, in cities like Ockholm and Womanchester, because ÄC still haven't fixed it's border problem, but coincidentally ÄC has instead developed an excellent surveillance program, which is if course needed when the border is wide opened to the Salami state, duh!
All this is of course highly speculative and shares no resemblance with the real world.
So yes, if we fix terrorism because of like uh poverty, it can probably be solved.
Why?