The EU Court ruled that “Backdoors may also be exploited by criminal networks and would seriously compromise the security of all users’ electronic communications. The Court takes note of the dangers of restricting encryption described by many experts in the field.” Any requirement to build in backdoors to encryption protocols for law enforcement agencies could also be taken advantage of by malicious actors.
The EU Court of Human Rights’ also builds on their acknowledgment that “mass surveillance does not appear to have contributed to the prevention of terrorist attacks, contrary to earlier assertions made by senior intelligence officials.”
As the EU Commision’s Chat Control Bill directly targets undermining secure end-to-end encryption, it now looks to be in trouble. In its current version, the Chat Control bill would require the scanning of content on your personal devices, including that which is sent via end-to-end encrypted messenger apps or encrypted email. At some point, providers would be required to either break this encryption to allow the scanning of content or scan content once it has been decrypted and is readable.
On February 13th, Europe received an early Valentine’s gift from the European Court of Human rights when they banned any laws that aims to weaken end-to-end encryption. This ruling is a major stumbling block for the EU Chat Control Bill, but does it really mean that Chat Control is dead? There are many reasons why Chat Control should never become law, we’ve collected the turn of events and steps you can take to help prevent this dangerous bill from ever being passed!
Why not for the UK? It’s a founding member state.
I am pretty sure part of Brexit is that it allows UK to not follow the court orders. Because they already have practices that are contrary to it, for instance on surveillance. But It’s a requirement to be a member of the EU. So there is no longer anything AFAIK that can punish UK for not following the court. In this regard UK was already, when they were still a member of EU, in conflict with these conditions.
As I understand it, this European Court of Human Rights has nothing to do with the EU.
Everybody and their grandma is in the Council of Europe, except for Vatican City, Belarus and Russia. And the UK was a founding member of the Council of Europe, so their leaving the EU shouldn’t change a thing regarding this court.