“It’s no secret that I would like to see an ambitious regulation on child sexual abuse,” Hummelgaard said.
The EU won’t stop there. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, this month unveiled a new internal security strategy, setting out plans to look into “lawful and effective” data access for law enforcement and to find technological solutions to access encrypted data.
It also wants to start work on a new data retention law, it said in the strategy, which would define the kinds of data that messaging services, including digital ones like WhatsApp, have to store and keep, and for how long. The EU’s top court struck down the previous data retention legislation in 2014, saying it interfered with people’s privacy rights.
The Commission is presenting a united front in their plans to help law enforcement. The internal security strategy was presented jointly by Henna Virkkunen, a powerful executive vice-president who heads the digital department, and Magnus Brunner, the commissioner in charge of home affairs. Both hail from the center-right European People’s Party, as does Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Police face privacy groups
In taking on encryption, European governments are heading for a massive clash with a powerful political coalition of privacy activists, cybersecurity experts, intelligence services and governments favoring privacy over police access.
Strands of that fight date all the way back to the last century. Cryptography was a powerful asset during the Cold War, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union aimed to restrict access to the technology to keep control of confidential communication. But the technology grew in stature during the age of the internet, underpinning everything from digital banking to sensitive data transfers. In recent years, an increasing number of major tech firms have moved toward using end-to-end encryption as a default setting.