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European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy
- vrighter 26d agooh for fuck's sake.... again???
- jruohonen 27d agoGoogle "security despite encryption" etc. It is some good rhetorical manipulation a'la EU over again.
- dgellow 27d agoWe see it in the EU here but the groups pushing for that are everywhere, including the US, UK, Australia, etc So frustrating to go though that exact same debate every few years
- microtonal 27d agoIndeed. This is also why we should resist getting locked further into the Apple/Google duopoly. In such closed systems it will be straightforward to require backdoors. Much harder if we have general-purpose computers that we can run our own software on.
- nerdalytics 27d agoThat's why for wallet features only Apple and Google are allowed. Condition everyone picking only iOS or Android, but not Linux, or others.
- inigyou 27d agoThis is why you shouldn't use a phone wallet. Doesn't your bank give you a card?
- microtonal 27d agoYep, conversely, this wouldn't have happened if we had a healthy mobile ecosystem.
- microtonal 27d agoIs the actual text of the workplan somewhere? The linked article refers to the text more effective tools for law enforcement in the press release and then infers or implies that this means more encryption backdoors, but I could not find that in an actual EU text? (Edit: I'm not doubting that they want to make backdoors mandatory, I'd just like to see the actual text.)
- petre 27d agoIt's linked in the second paragraph of article. More effective tools for law enforcement and stronger JHA agencies Law enforcement needs the right tools to be effective. And with 85% of criminal investigations relying on digital information, this includes lawful access to data: … · A Roadmap on lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement, · A Technology Roadmap on encryption, and an impact assessment with a view to updating the EU's data retention rules. This is pushing for encryption backdoors in eurocrat speech: lawful access to data, roadmap, impact assesment, updating rules.
- microtonal 27d agoWhat you are citing from is an older press release from April 2025.
- AnssiH 27d agoThe article in this HA submission itself is from April 2025.
- yyny 27d ago"Law enforcement need lawful ways to enter a home" "See! The government is trying to pick all our locks" Okay dude. Taking off the tinfoil hat for a second here, but maybe they're just trying to do the thing they say they are doing, namely, lessen friction to obtain things like camera footage, financial data, and internet usage.
- ChrisMarshallNY 27d ago
- miroljub 27d agoOnly a fascist like totalitarian government would keep pushing for more and control and les freedoms. Their biggest ploy was they convicted people 1984 was a description of a communist dictatorship, and not an execution manual for European democracies on how to strengthen their grips.
- tokai 27d agoI'm so tired of reading stuff like this under any article covering the political struggle over surveillance in EU. While US posts about surveilling journalists, letting 'law' enforcement run wild with no oversight, and so on, either gets flagged to death or talked down.
- baal80spam 27d agoFunny, I see something completely opposite.
- DarmokTanagra 27d agoWhen you stop seeing it is when you know there is a real problem.
- watwut 27d agoIt has nothing to with EU itseld and a lot of to do with far right trying to turn people against EU. EU in general is the last hope for democracy and it is kinda at risk. They want to push it over the line and break down. Just a few months ago, there was push to call European countries vasals of USA - exactly when they said "no". Somehow Venezuela is not a vassal state and somehow Saudi completely dependent on USA were "standing on own feet". That disappeard, now EU is fascist. Somehow Orban never was tho.
- vixen99 27d agoFrom a comment further up: 'If you don't know, the unfortunate way the EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.'.
- Kim_Bruning 27d agoMeanwhile the latest gen ai agents are able to crack everything not nailed down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494301 Leaving holes might not be the best plan atm
- nekusar 27d agoI came from the oldschool cypherpunk cryptogeeks when it meant secure comms and not shitcoin. There was a subset of us who thought that encryption wasn't the final goal, but steganography was needed to HIDE the encrypted comms. Else simple encryption could be attacked legally, or with a crowbar. And with every bloody week a large government is "let's backdoor encryption haha" its high time to really develop stego that can overlay on top of text, pictures, audio, and video. Only then can they play fuck-fuck games about spying on our comms, and they'll see innocuous banter - but its really stego'd comms overlay.
- notpushkin 27d agoThe point was never to make it impossible to have E2E communication. They just want to make it too inconvenient so that they can spy on the ordinary people. Criminals will, of course, find a way to have secure conversations – this is just a pretext.
- mohamedkoubaa 27d agoRare AI slop use case
- qiine 27d agoI think people use emoji for this
- ETH_start 27d agoCryptocurrency justifiably has a bad rep, given how much profit-motivated hype is attached to it, but it offers an alternative to steganography for resisting government surveillance: fully decentralized platforms that massively increase the cost of enforcing laws against the use of strong encryption. The public blockchain is the first solution to create a stateful protocol that is fully decentralized and can persist over a long period of time. For a public blockchain to function, it requires a native digital currency that compensates the parties who provide the economically costly digital signal that is used to coordinate the convergence on a shared state.
- nekusar 27d ago
- random3 27d agoAnd, of course, no thought is given to the implications this could have in conjunction with the next Orban. Europe is aligning against Russia as a threat, while at the same time shooting itself in the foot by disabling basic rights like privacy with absolutely no memory of how much more basic lack of privacy (enabled by Facebook) was leveraged with relatively simple tools (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...) to help Brexit happen (effectively breaking Europe apart). This quote from Apocalypto stuck with me "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
- ronsor 27d agoEurope has learned the lesson that extremists are bad, but it has not learned the lesson that the tools shouldn't exist.
- ExoticPearTree 27d agoThere will always be extremists on both sides of the political spectrum. The problem is quite simple: people swing more to one side or another if their voices are not heard. The current boogeyman is the growth of the far-right in Europe. But that could have been prevented if the EU did not have an open-doors migration policy to start with. And to have listened to the people on other issues too.
- BonerWiener 27d ago> But that could have been prevented if the EU did not have an open-doors migration policy to start with. And to have listened to the people on other issues too. I believe there are more nuances to this, then simply blaming it on immigration policies. There are a lot of variables in place for why far right movements are and have been on the rise in the EU. And I certainly believe the issues could've been handled better by each member state. Yes, immigration is a serious problem. Especially if member States doesn't increase budgets for handling said immigrants. After all, why does immigration even happen in the first place? Aren't we as a western society responsible for the destruction and destabiliztion of the eastern countries?
- bradley13 27d agoThe European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators. If you don't know, the unfortunate way thf EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them. If the Parliament votes "wrong", the Commission just repackages the idea in a new bill, pulls a couple of dirty tricks, and tried again. They only have to succeed once. See ChatControl for a prime example. So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...
- christkv 27d agoThis its more like an oligarch edict with democratic dressing. Its set up so the European elite can force political chance without having to deal with annoying things like democracy other than in name
- throw0101a 27d agoSignal, Apple iMessage, and WhatsApp have to announce at some point that they will simply stop providing services to any country/region that insists on breaking E2EE. All you'll be left with is unencrypted RCS. It's a bit of a 'nuclear option', but at the end of the day, once one jurisdiction forces them to break the math, every other one will as well. IMHO, it's the only way to force the proponent(s) of these proposal(s) to see the folly of their ways (and it's no guarantee that they will).
- burnerthrow008 27d agoSorry, maybe I'm dumb. Why would "gatekeepers" poke the bear?
- microtonal 27d agoFWIW, iMessage is largely unencrypted already. Yes, the messages themselves are E2E encrypted, but most people do not enable Advanced Data Protection, but do enable iCloud Backups, which causes messages only to be encrypted at-rest with keys that Apple holds [1]. And even if you enable ADP, most people that you communicate with didn't. A similar situation applies to WhatsApp. On iPhone, the messages are stored in iCloud Backups. On Android they can be backed up to Google Drive but E2E encryption is not the default. The only exception is Signal, which opts out of iCloud and Android backups and had to roll their own backup solution for E2E backups. So in practice, US law enforcement can probably already access iMessage/WhatsApp messages. [1] See footnote 9: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
- jbstack 27d agoAs someone who uses Signal and WhatsApp, I would be extremely happy if those companies blocked access in my jurisdiction if such laws are implemented. In fact, if they agreed to insert backdoor access I would never trust them again, even if they subsequently reversed it. We have to be willing to suffer personal inconveniences to stand up to these types of policies.
- VorpalWay 27d agoThere are peer to peer (or otherwise decentralised, e.g. multiple servers operated by many different people) alternatives to Signal. I haven't tried any of them, nor do I know which ones have been audited. But if the worst comes to the worst, there are alternatives that are hard to block. In particular I remember reading about DeltaChat which piggiebacks on normal email infrastructure, making it really hard to block without massive collateral damage.
- jbstack 27d agoWith all the current concerns about rogue and mis-aligned AI, and about how we've made essentially zero progress on making sure that AI is safe and trustworthy, NOW you want to put backdoors in encryption algorithms? We should be doing everything we possibly can to make our systems more secure, not less. This type of policy was terrible when they first thought of it. Now it's outright negligent and dangerous.
- trinsic2 26d agoThere are people in the background that are benefiting from all this and it seems to me that its not limited to just one country. Someone knows that weakening all of these systems globally has a lot to gain.
- NooneAtAll3 25d agoare we sure Ai hasn't escaped long long ago?
- tonis2 27d agoStuff like that make people want to leave EU, not some "enemy propaganda" which is real unfortunate in current times.
- rdm_blackhole 27d agoIf you read /r/europe, you would be convinced that the reason that some people are against the EU is only because of: - Russian trolls - US trolls - Chinese trolls Its never the EU's fault. Never is there a sense of saying, maybe we should try to understand why people do not agree with us. It's my way or the highway and if you don't agree or criticize the EU in any way shape or form then you are just a far-right extremist or just plain dumb. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
- inigyou 27d agoHere we see something posted from 18 months ago as if it's happening today. In the intervening time, the democracy rejected the proposal. So what is this post if not fearmongering by some kind of troll?
- vlyan 27d agor/europe represents Europeans about as accurately as r/politics represents Americans. it's a heavily curated consent manufacturing outlet. what you see there is what its political commissars allow to be seen.
- miohtama 27d agoThere is a reason why the popularity of far right is all time high everywhere in the EU.
- hawk_ 27d agoLike far right isn't going to vote in mass surveillance the moment they have any chance. (Not disputing that there are other frustrations that are fuelling the rise of far right, correct or not. But isn't one of those)
- AnssiH 27d agoThis is from April 2025. Also, whether the plan pushes for backdoors is debatable since those are not actually mentioned.
- teekert 27d agoOh man I will never let them read my private comms. So what are they going to do to me? I’m afraid that I, as a good person and father, am going to be punished for not letting them read my private messages. I’m afraid for my future in the EU.
- microtonal 27d agoThe problem is that we keep on voting in politicians (left and right) that do not fight for freedom and privacy. The EC in the end is only an extension of national governments (through the European Council) and the European Parliament (in the sense that they propose and vote for EC members). There are parties that truly care about these values, but populists, corporate influence campaigns, and foreign interference successfully casts them as: responsible for immigration, disastrous for the economy, or whatever else you can find. It's funny, because in my country some right-wing parties hold pro-privacy/freedom parties responsible for everything that is wrong, whereas said right-wing parties have been been almost continuously in power since the early 80s and some of the pro-privacy/freedom parties have never been in power. Yet, the people eat it up. There is some truth to "every country has the government it deserves".
- vladms 27d agoWhile I don't mind privacy, I care much more about other topics, like, for example, education. The right wing party in the country I vote in, when it got into power (not for long thankfully) managed to slash 1 billion of education! The next generation must understand how stuff works. If we have privacy and no education, we might get burnt on stakes because any invented stupid reasons, no matter if someone read or not your communications.
- trinsic2 26d agoIMO this is bigger than voting. Its a systemic problem, we need systemic change to fix this.
- HDBaseT 26d agoThe systemic change is to prevent lobbying from the likes of Israel.
- bartleeanderson 27d agoLet them learn their lesson. As soon as it comes together it will be taken over by the first AI to crack it and then they will be pwned and have to learn the hard way. No child, spoiled, stupid or otherwise will learn hard lessons without experiencing pain.
- 331c8c71 27d agoYeah the bureaucracy like eu is almost a perfect setup to deflect responsibility. "Apparently the measures taken by our predecessors were not ideal in hindsight but the need to protect our children remains of utmost importance. With the lessons learned we will now take steps to ensure the bright future for us all!" lol
- EmbarrassedHelp 26d agoCanada is about the learn this lesson the hard way with bill C-22. At the rate things are going, Canadians will wake up to find themselves being blocked by WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal and other popular messaging apps. The legislation currently have weak surface level protections against encryption backdoors, but law enforcement are seeking to remove those. The legislation also requires mandatory data retention and surveillance, which also means that messaging apps will ban Canada.
- 1e1a 27d ago(2025)
- shevy-java 27d agoThe lobbyists are working hard again to abuse every EU citizen. This is quite typical of the fake commission here - not voted in by the people, not working for the people. An alien organisation that constantly wants to expand the EU and increase taxes to self-finance itself.
- ExoticPearTree 27d agoSo "Think of the children" did not work and now they go about it with "Fear the Russians" or "Fear the Chinese" or whatever boogieman they're looking at creating. From the article: "The new EU strategy promises that cybersecurity and fundamental rights will be protected as a future encryption backdoor is implemented." - so a revival of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" mantra? The question that I have: what do they fear so much they spend so much time and effort trying to weaken or outright ban end-to-end encryption for private communications?
- t0bia_s 27d agoBackdoor is a weakness of design by definition. How it can possibly protect EU?
- j45 27d agoPoliticians and the interests around them just don't quit.
- jskddkkdkfk 27d ago[flagged]
- kristjank 27d agoThis is in a desperate need of a (2025) flag.
- 293725903 27d ago[dead]
- TheChaplain 27d agoThese threads are amusing. In an earlier one about Iceland and EU, people criticizing EU were downvoted, called russian bots or far-right. I don't expect much difference here. Chat control and ProtectEU are certainly not the last totalitarian measures EU will invent, there will be more. And I find it interesting that people still defend EU without any hesitation. Now I think the initial trade union was great and a necessary counter weight when competing with larger economies and countries. But it rather quickly evolving into something that is less concerned about the citizens, and more about staying in power.
- s_dev 27d agoIt's not that, it's calling the EU a dictatorship, meanwhile the US has genuinely slipped out of the liberal democracy rankings to a electoral democracy (the same as Hungary last year) and seems to be on the path to full blown oligarchy. There is genuine concern here about this bill but it's not the elephant in the room. The EU hasn't threatened to invade a NATO country, isn't initiating trade wars with close allies and seemingly done a 180 on foreign policy in the past 2 years. Last year, there many seemed to have major concerns about Hungary but again it was pointed out that things could be turned around. I don't see how the US is doing to turn this around.
- throw-qqqqq 26d agoI live in Scandinavia, and I’m sad to say, but most progressive legislation comes from the EU. Our national government only legislates on populist issues. Racist laws, more surveillance, less oversight of cops and authorities, bans on big dogs and burkahs etc. - either symbolic issues that affect very few people in reality or mostly just limiting freedom and civil rights, never expanding on it. I don’t like that we have many unelected technocrats and the corruption sucks, but the EU changes my life for the better. I honestly can’t say that about our national governments over the past two decades.
- traceroute66 27d agoThis is from 2025. I don't know why someone has seen fit to repost it again in 2026.... I'm guessing they didn't look at the date. And lots of people here are spouting FUD. In the ensuing period, the EU took expert advice later in 2025, and as they say in an update a few months later in June 2025[1]: The High-Level Group recommended taking a cautious approach to designing solutions for lawful access to systems, whereby industry should not be asked to integrate systems that are likely to weaken encryption in a generalised or systemic way for all users of a service. Lawful access to data must remain targeted and limited to specific communications on a case-by-case basis. As a general rule, any solutions should be implemented based on clear standards that are developed with input from all stakeholders, including industry representatives, data protection, privacy and cybersecurity experts, and law enforcement practitioners. However, caution is warranted when dealing with encryption, as underlined by the High-Level Group. So there is ZERO EVIDENCE that the EU are "pushing for encryption backdoor". It is instead quite clear from the above that the experts are on "our" side AND the EU are listening to them. Instead, all these publications are just a reflection of a democratic process of discussing modern threats. The documents clearly mention "terrorism, organised crime, online fraud, drug trafficking, child sexual abuse, online sexual extortion, ransomware". So it is only fair and reasonable that politicians should be discussing ways to counter these threats. And quite honestly they would not be doing their job if someone did not MENTION "encryption" and ask "the question" to the experts and other stakeholders. The fact they are DISCUSSING "encryption" does not automatically mean they want to backdoor it. I know it is alien to people in the US under the present administration, but this is how proper politics works. You openly discuss issues of the day, you seek opinions from stakeholders and experts, rinse and repeat until you make a decision (or not). The present US administration could do with learning a thing or two. ;) People here need to rein in the FUD. [1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52025DC0349 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
- whatsThisBtn4 27d agoVery European move. Politicians are quick to criticize when Russia does it, but I guess it's okay because it's Europe. They have magic cheese that can only be bought from one island in Greece........ I'm still mourning the pre gdpr Internet. Now productivity took a hit for cookie theater.
- matheusmoreira 27d ago> Lawful Access Always a cute little euphemism for it.
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- m101 26d agoWhen I was young and naive I voted to remain in the EU in the brexit referendum. Since then I’ve learned a few things and realise the EU is not an institution to be affiliated with politically. In terms of what we did with the opportunity we had - we totally dropped the ball. It’s just so disappointing how the EU is still so popular across Europe.
- wewewedxfgdf 26d agoSurely it's to protect the kids?
- reindeer2 26d ago[flagged]
- algorithm314 26d agoIf they want mass surveillance they must allow to massively spy on them. It's not protectEU. It is protect them.
- pclowes 26d agoI just have no idea how they are remotely going to enforce this. Like the bad actors can make E2E apps and side load or have their own store. Now with LLMs, this is increasingly trivial. You cannot stop pedophiles and terrorists from using math. They might as well try to outlaw the Pythagorean theorem. This just makes your average law of abiding citizen more vulnerable and the surveillance state more powerful.
- cindyllm 26d ago[dead]
- Hobadee 26d agoEasy solution; design a system with backdoors, implement it in some banking or other system the people at the top use, compromise said backdoor and release all the private info of those arguing for the backdoors. Things will very quickly turn around. (That, or narrow exceptions will be carved out for those in power.)
- catoc 26d agoAccording to the EU this will protect us from ”hostile states, and powerful criminal groups and terrorists” Because said criminals will politely follow the law and use the broken, backdoor-ed encryption? Instead of the widely available opensourced true encryption? Of course not. The true goal is mass surveillance - not protection from <insert-bad-thing-everybody-has-to-agree-is-bad>
- glub 26d agoHow is this not an indication of a failed system? Why does EU/EC/etc system even allow for the same failed initiative to be pushed again and again under a different candy wrap with a rate of a machine gun? Not always a different wrap even. They can essentially do "let's end the encryption this quarter, eh?" "No? Okay, we'll try in 3 months". Sure, this may be a topic that flies under the radar of common people, because they mostly do not understand implications well enough, but what if it was a push for something that is understandable as very sinister by everyday person? Would the system allow that?
- hn_submit 26d agoWhy are European citizens unable to put this to rest? Why aren't there mass protests against these totalitarian plans? I believe it has to do with the influx of Muslim migrants and the instability it brings in European societies which could lead to civil war. Politicians realize they need more tools in their toolbox to put a lid on possible unrest, dissent, protests against immigration and upheaval.