from Hacker News

EU Police Chiefs want an end to end-to-end encryption

by Unfrozen0688 on 4/23/24, 9:52 PM with 36 comments

• by anonzzzies on 4/24/24, 9:02 AM

  Almost everyone in any kind of power wants this except for themselves of course. It has nothing to do with 'the children' or 'crime'; they are not that naive. But some politicians who believe the crime & children narrative while not being in the same court as the censoring crowd might be naive enough to vote for it. It's a world wide illness and it should be prevented.

• by gmerc on 4/24/24, 1:15 PM

  They probably want everyone to have glass walls in their house too.

  Doesn’t mean they should get it either.

  London has more cameras than any other city in the west but leads crime significantly.

• by blackeyeblitzar on 4/24/24, 4:44 AM

  Once the encryption is banned, the next step will be for online safety czars to censor speech they disagree with, even in private communications. No thanks.

• by BSDobelix on 4/24/24, 10:25 AM

  >Our homes are becoming more dangerous than our streets as crime is moving online.

  We have to fight that, bring crime back to the streets i say!! So we can stay at home and feel safe.

• by Kim_Bruning on 4/24/24, 1:26 AM

  I read this as "European Police Chiefs want everyone to leave their digital keys under the doormat". I always have the idea that police are late to this particular arms race and don't realize that their way of thinking about security is still somewhere last century.

  I mean, I don't even mean it to be insulting or anything. People can't be good at everything. It seems that police I've met so far (n<10) are pretty awesome people, but they don't seem to be particularly security conscious qua electronic security.

  Else the police chiefs would (for one) realize that they need that end-to-end encryption themselves. It's a fairly basic building block, you'd think.

  OTOH, maybe my impression is wrong, and there are exceptionally skilled police people who I've just never met? But why would they be advising their chiefs so badly then?

• by xchip on 4/24/24, 9:40 AM

  Everybody in the town knows who the drug lords are and where they live, the police apparently not, that is why they need to monitor us.

• by zx8080 on 4/24/24, 9:01 AM

  The aim is probably not social security, but political power through total censorship.

• by protocolture on 4/24/24, 9:04 AM

  Thats funny, I want an end to EU police chiefs.

• by CRConrad on 4/24/24, 12:39 PM

  From TFA:

  > Europol’s Executive Director Catherine De Bolle, said:

  > 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.

  Well yeah, as per the traditional definition of "to be secured", that's exactly what stuff like end-to-end encryption is for. Seems like the problem is just that the European Police Chiefs apparently have a different definition of "to be secured".

  So tell me, dear European Police Chiefs, whom do you think I should want my communications to be secured from? Aha, not you, you say? Well, sorry, I beg to differ.

• by LunaSea on 4/24/24, 5:41 PM

  Can't wait for this law to be struck down as not being compatible with GDPR.

  If you can't correctly encrypt messages on disk and in transit you can't guarantee that you secured user's personal data.