European citizens’ private online messages should be open to the authorities to peruse, according to Europol and the heads of national police forces.
In a joint statement published on Sunday, they are calling for end-to-end encryption to be abolished. Through end-to-end encryption, only those sending and receiving the message can read it—even social media companies are prevented from accessing communications between the users.
The announcement comes as Meta, the owner of Facebook and WhatsApp, is rolling out the end-to-end encryption technology for its well-known chat platform Messenger. Whatsapp had already been outfitted with it.
The statement maintains that such a privacy violation would only be used to “protect the vulnerable to in all our countries on a daily basis from the most heinous of crimes, including but not limited to terrorism, child sexual abuse, human trafficking, drugs smuggling, murder, and economic crime.”
It is worth noting that the heavy emphasis on children (“a shared duty to keep the public safe, especially children”) is well-rehearsed rhetoric often used to play on the emotions to circumvent people’s critical faculties.
Without end-to-end encryption, European authorities would only need to send a simple request to the service provider to gain access to any citizen’s private communications.
In a press release, Catherine De Bolle, executive director of Europol, the EU’s agency for supporting and coordinating the fight against serious and organized crime, terrorism, and cybercrime, defended the proposal:
Our homes are becoming more dangerous than our streets as crime is moving online. To keep our society and people safe, we need this digital environment to be secured. Tech companies have a social responsibility to develop a safer environment where law enforcement and justice can do their work. If police lose the ability to collect evidence, our society will not be able to protect people from becoming victims of crime.
In a weak attempt at assuaging the obvious privacy concerns, investigative judge and cybercrime specialist Philippe Van Linthout told VRT NWS:
In some non-democratic countries, there is indeed danger in [authorities having] access to personal data. People should not be arrested out of the blue for having insulted a head of state in a WhatsApp message. Thanks to the many checks and balances we have in a democratic society, we should not fear this.
Whether citizens might face arrest should ‘hate’-inciting memes be found among their private communications—as might soon be the case in the increasingly authoritarian Irish Republic—has not been disclosed.
On X, formerly Twitter, Belgian privacy expert Matthias Dobbelaere-Welvaert asked:
When is enough, enough? In public life, we have zero privacy left. We can’t call anonymously, can’t walk or drive down the street anonymously, because every few feet there’s a camera. Algorithms are watching us, facial recognition lurks eagerly around the corner.
Not too long ago, Europol discovered that, to evade detection, hardened criminals favor the Sky ECC communication service tool—an extensive network of encrypted chat services and phones—rather than well-known services from large tech entities. Given this, doing away with encryption on Whatsapp and Messenger is unlikely to yield much benefit.
