Society needs to know why police and investigation services need access to encrypted data, otherwise there is a risk that the public will lose trust in these agencies and other government institutions, Europol chief Catherine De Bolle revealed at the Munich Cyber Security Conference. De Bolle reiterated that investigative agencies must be able to have ‘lawful access’ to encrypted data, reports The Record. There should also be a ‘legal framework’ that ‘reflects the reality of cyberspace’. What exactly this means, the head of the European intelligence agency did not reveal.
Just a few weeks ago, De Bolle had argued to the Financial Times that anonymity is not a fundamental right. ‘When we have a search warrant and are standing in front of a house and the door is locked, and you know the criminal is at home, the population will not accept that you cannot go in.’ According to the Europol top woman, investigating agencies must therefore be able to read encrypted messages. ‘Without this, you cannot maintain democracy,’ she said. De Bolle therefore believes chat services have a ‘social responsibility’ to give services access to encrypted data.
By this logic, they expect us to hand over a copy of the keys to our homes in case they need it if we break the law.
But the analogy falls apart because homes can be breached easily, keys won’t stop a C4 charge or battering ram. Encryption can’t easily be breached, and that causes a power shift from government entities to individuals, for better or worse.
The higher ups never quite seem to lead by example so why should anyone follow? Sadly I’m sure eventually fatigue will set in and people will stop fighting against clear violations of privacy.
As long as it doesn’t affect the majority of people, it likely won’t be fought that hard. And “for the children” argument will go quite far most likely.
I would argue that fatigue will com faster to the smallest group. That being the elites vs a population practicing civil disobedience.
This is why including messaging about avoiding privacy burnout, the approachable videos to small steps for the public to take to safeguard themselves from the low hanging attack vectors, and shared groups less this is so important.
As a people, just like we need to be generally better at washing our hands to avoid getting sick, we need to practice privacy hygeine as part of a healthy daily regimine vs making folks feel obsessive over minutiae.
If it’s a pure numbers game, I’ll use numbers from the US that I know, the police, military, and government roles make up 5% 17.5 million (high estimate) of 350 million people. 1.2 million are in prison currently and 5.4 million in correctional programs.
Even 10% of people practicing privacy in this population is 35 million people that well outpaces what the government was able to do in 2022 when privacy was less of a concern with behind the scenes politics as usual.
Firstly, they are wrong and it’s not up to them. The fact they think that it is is deeply disturbing. Anonymity is one piece of the most fundamental requirements for democracy.
Secondly, their argument is deeply flawed. You know what the population wouldn’t accept? If the state could open the lock of every door simultaneously with no oversight which is exactly what they’re proposing with an encryption backdoor. The problem of limited resources isn’t a problem in the digital world.
This is an attempt to use media to craft the narrative of what “the public wants” which aims to convince the nonenlightened citizen to obey the manufactured social norm to avoid being removed from “the population”.