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Comment by patrickmcnamara | Hacker News Reader

When has the EU mandated encryption backdoors?

They keep trying it via e.g. chat control

The US has also tried it multiple times. So has Canada. It's been shut down each time. This isn't a unique to the EU problem.

Didn't UK had "The Snooper's Charter" as well?

Encryption backdoors is not a case of extending reach for a government, but an effort to get the capabilities back.

They were able to do that before. They just want to be able to continue now.

Note: No, I don't support the idea of backdoors. On the contrary.

The fact that other countries have tried to do <bad thing> does not mean it's acceptable for another country to do <bad thing>

So why is the criticism about it disproportionately leveled at one jurisdiction?

I am not sure if you replied in good faith, but here you go.

The reason is that they have been trying again and again to do this in various forms, slightly modifying tactics so any opposition to it has to start from scratch.

2015 - https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/29/encryption-rhetoric-untang...

2016 - https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/encryption-under-fire-in-e...

2017 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/19/eu-outlaw...

2020 - https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2020...

2021 - https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2021...

2023 - https://www.wired.com/story/europe-break-encryption-leaked-d...

2025 - https://www.techspot.com/news/107408-europe-proposes-backdoo...

2026 - https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/07/10/chat-control-10-pas...

Isn't that simply how politics works, though? People who are invested in security keep lobbying for their interests. Generally when political actors fail they dust themselves off and try again, on any issue. Also you haven't shown how the EU is diffrent from any other jurisdiction in this regard.

In the end, US doesn't need encryption backdoors because most chat and email protocols are not end-to-end encrypted and the TLS data streams are decrypted in the datacenter owned by US companies.

The protocols themselves are not important anymore. It's all variants of http to Google or Amazon. What's important is control of the end user device, and Google and Apple keep a remote root connection with "their" terminals at all time. Any data that is obtained remotely will be from the presentation layer, not the network layer. This is also harder to US adversaries to access, so an argument could be made that for the majority of normal people this is a net increase in security.

If you wanted to make the corresponsing strong argument for Chat Control and its ilk, the EU just wants (the juicy part of) what the US already has. The remote root level control of most end user devices is not under EU juristiction. So they naturally want companies operating in the EU to give them one piece of access to the presentation layer, too.

This argument is what one must be prepared for, the encryption itself is less relevant..

Exactly right.

Chat control is merely their newest attempt at this, carefully navigating around the reasons it was opposed last year.

They keep trying to legislate encryption backdoors by any means, and once they manage to get their foot into the door every other country will use that as a precedent to also mandate it.

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