European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy

143

nnickslaughter02 about 3 hours ago 38 commentsRead Article on reclaimthenet.org

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

50% Positive

Analyzed from 1713 words in the discussion.

Discussion (38 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

bradley13•about 1 hour ago

The 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•28 minutes ago

This 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

random3•about 1 hour ago

And, 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_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•about 1 hour ago

Europe has learned the lesson that extremists are bad, but it has not learned the lesson that the tools shouldn't exist.

jbstack•22 minutes ago

With 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.

Kim_Bruning•about 2 hours ago

Meanwhile the latest gen ai agents are able to crack everything not nailed down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494301

Leaving holes might not be the best plan atm

microtonal•about 2 hours ago

Is 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•about 2 hours ago

It'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•about 2 hours ago

What you are citing from is an older press release from April 2025.

yyny•about 1 hour 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.

JoshTriplett•34 minutes ago

> "See! The government is trying to pick all our locks"

Them having to bring lockpicks (or more commonly a battering ram) would be preferable. This is more like "all locks and locksmiths must only manufacture locks that can be opened with one of a handful of TSA-approved backdoor keys".

ChrisMarshallNY•about 1 hour ago

Maybe. I think that strengthening laws that force servers to be more diligent would be unpopular (especially with this crowd), but it's a lot different from forcing backdoors.

The idea of backdoors needs to be drawn and quartered, and the pieces buried under crossroads.

rdm_blackhole•26 minutes ago

No that is not what they are doing.

This is the same thing they tried to do with Chat Control v2, that is to force providers to access data before it is encrypted and store it in case one day someone becomes a criminal.

You should look up all the past posts on HN on this very topic.

The end goal is to track and collect everything and/or make it possible to decrypt what they need when they need it including: emails, chat messages, posts on social media, images, and who knows what else.

And the EU has the gall to criticize Russia and China for cracking down on freedom of speech and on digital rights, what a joke!

There is no safe backdoor just for the "good" guys. It doesn't exist, never has and never will. It's that simple.

tonis2•16 minutes ago

Stuff like that make people want to leave EU, not some "enemy propaganda" which is real unfortunate in current times.

rdm_blackhole•3 minutes ago

If 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.

throw0101a•34 minutes ago

Signal, 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).

VorpalWay•10 minutes ago

There 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.

microtonal•20 minutes ago

FWIW, 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

jbstack•18 minutes ago

As 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.

rdm_blackhole•9 minutes ago

There was already a tweet/post from the Signal CEO in which she said that if the Chat Control v2 law was enforced (aka client side scanning of messages before encryption), that they would simply leave the EU market instead of complying.

burnerthrow008•28 minutes ago

Sorry, maybe I'm dumb. Why would "gatekeepers" poke the bear?

jruohonen•about 2 hours ago

Google "security despite encryption" etc. It is some good rhetorical manipulation a'la EU over again.

dgellow•about 2 hours ago

We 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•about 2 hours ago

Indeed. 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•about 2 hours ago

That's why for wallet features only Apple and Google are allowed. Condition everyone picking only iOS or Android, but not Linux, or others.

nekusar•about 1 hour ago

I 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•about 1 hour ago

The 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.

ETH_start•6 minutes ago

Cryptocurrency 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 state consensus.

qiine•40 minutes ago

I think people use emoji for this

mohamedkoubaa•44 minutes ago

Rare AI slop use case

miroljub•about 2 hours ago

Only 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•about 2 hours ago

I'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.

DarmokTanagra•about 1 hour ago

When you stop seeing it is when you know there is a real problem.

baal80spam•about 2 hours ago

Funny, I see something completely opposite.

watwut•about 1 hour ago

It 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•31 minutes ago

From 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.'.

rdm_blackhole•12 minutes ago

> with far right trying to turn people against EU.

The far right does not need to do that, the EU is doing it itself just fine.

Secondly this push like the one for Chat Control comes from the commission itself and as far as I can tell the far right has not taken over the commission so what you are saying makes no sense.

> now EU is fascist.

Chat control V1, Chat control V2, various data retention schemes (aka invasive metadata storage), DSA (aka censorship), age verification law and so on...

Don't believe me, see for your self: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/going-dark-expert-gro...

Here is small excerpt:

The #EUGoingDark group aims to develop access and monitoring paths to our devices (e.g. smartphones, smart homes, cars) and applications. In doing so, it relies on industry cooperation, influencing technology standardisation committees and standardised access protocols. The group wants to establish the concept of “security by design” in the EU. This means that technology should be developed according to the wishes of police forces and intelligence services and designed to be interceptable from the outset. In short: investigating authorities should be able to gain access to data on all our end devices. Even if the group explicitly denies it, this is about backdoors in one form or another.

War is peace, freedom is slavery and all that.