Brussels faces privacy crossroads over encryption backdoors

Summary

Europe, long seen as a bastion of privacy and digital rights, will debate this week whether to enforce surveillance on citizens' devices. Representatives from member states will meet on Friday to consider legislation critics call Chat Control, aka "laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse," which seeks to require ISPs or messaging app providers to scan user content or backdoor encryption so that intelligence agencies can do it themselves. It's the latest attempt in a three-year campaign by some in the community to allow government agencies unprecedented access to private communications. The proposed legislation has been in the works since 2022 but immediately drew fire from security professionals. After being rejected by EU member states repeatedly, this latest attempt has come at the request of the Danish delegation, which currently holds the EU presidency, and should go to a full vote next month. An open letter signed by more than 600 security academics, practitioners, and stakeholders has called on the proposals to be dropped and claimed they are unworkable and highly intrusive. It also points out that the false positive detection rate for such a serious crime is unacceptable and could lead to many people being unfairly smeared. One signatory, Matthew Green, associate professor of computer science at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, told The Register that the plans, if implemented, would be a "national security disaster." He pointed out that if encryption backdoors were implemented, adversarial nations would see it as a "Manhattan Project" which could be used to expose all data, and if client-side scanning was used then it would create a privacy nightmare. The revised legislative proposals call for systems to be set up to find all current "and new" forms of CSAM, but decline to give any guidance as to how this seemingly impossible task would be achieved. Government and military communications would be exempt from the plan. "It i...