The Joint Declaration was agreed upon at an informal meeting of the European Chiefs of Police in London hosted by the National Crime Agency on 18 April.
Police Chiefs of all EU Member States and Schengen Associated Countries were invited, alongside Europol’s Executive Director.
Here is the declaration (pdf).
Our societies have not previously tolerated spaces that are beyond the reach of law enforcement, where criminals can communicate safely and child abuse can flourish.
I am pretty sure, churches were “tolerated spaces” bevor e2ee was a thing.
Our societies have previously tolerated a whole lot of spaces where conversations could be had without fear of law enforcement listening in, but many of those have disappeared as communications moved online. Encryption is the only thing that can restore the balance.
And letters. If you go to the stasi museum in Berlin they have the letter opening equipment as proof of how despicable they were.
You don’t even have to go so far.
Several European countries consider physical letters to be confidential.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondenceStrangely enough that confidentiality suddenly no longer applies to other, “newer” forms of communication.
Probably because it’s less easy for security services to ignore.
The only question here is: why do European police chiefs want to help Russia and China intercept our communications?
Because they secretly like authoritarian systems?
If you make encryption illegal, only criminals will use encryption!
As far as I know killing people is illegal, hasn’t stopped some to do it nevertheless. And it won’t help protect the infamous “the children” either.
I guess that means that those same police chiefs don’t use any end to end encryption whatsoever.
There’s not much they can do about PGP, though. Sure, encrypting stuff manually can get a little bit annoying, but nothing a quick browset extension wouldn’t fix.
The moat difficult part will ve convincing your friends to use it, and actually sharing keys, but if you really need to hide what you’re talking about, it’s not like stopping a e2e rollout will help in amy capacity. Quite the contrary - people who they want to target with this will only start to be even more carefull, reaulting in them loosing access even to those backdoored privacy messengers they already probably have and criminals rely on.
What if they make it illegal and jail people whose messages they can’t open?
Once you have a tool that uses pgp with keys you provide, and encrypts messages in normal chats, changing the actuall message format would probably be easy, so there’s plenty of room for adittional steganography. Images would make for a perfect cover, with something like last-bit steganography.
But, I hope it won’t come to that.
is this declaration about e2e in general, or is there a specific new rollout they are referencing?
The declaration, published today and supported by Europol and the European Police Chiefs, comes as end-to-end encryption has started to be rolled out across Meta’s messenger platform.
Hungary is in bed with the CCP. Maybe the other police forces see advantages to themselves. It remains to be seen which of these chiefs are still in their positions a year from now, given the EU’s generally pro-privacy stance
