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EU countries did not wait five days to start a new push towards greater digital surveillance after the terrorist attack in Vienna. Currently, major restrictions on secure encryption will be quickly implemented for services like WhatsApp, Signal, and others.
This arises from an internal document from the German Presidency of the Council to the delegations of the member states in the Council, which SPIEGEL has received. The document is dated November 6. Austrian radio had reported it first. The decision could be taken at the beginning of December at the video meeting of the Ministers of the Interior and Justice at the EU level.
Then the EU Commission would have to draw up a draft regulation, which would then be debated in Parliament and Council. Only then could a corresponding regulation enter into force.
Failures in the Austrian fight against terrorism
The action against secure encryption was originally initiated by Great Britain, and more recently France promoted it at the EU level. In early October, interior ministers from five countries – Britain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada – called on Internet companies to equip their IT networks with back doors for law enforcement officials.
So far, there is no indication that the lack of surveillance facilities had an impact on the investigations into the terrorist attack in Vienna. Instead, there were probably major mishaps at the Austrian Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Fight Against Terrorism (BVT). Among other things, the office apparently ignored warnings from the Slovak authorities that the murderer Kujtim F. tried to obtain ammunition from the neighboring country.
Master key as back door
According to the information available from ORF.at, the “Exceptional Access” tracking method must be specifically chosen, which is already implicit in the text of the resolution. Out of eight possible model proposals, the one from the British National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), which belongs to the British military intelligence service GCHQ, is said to have been selected.
Therefore, messaging services such as WhatsApp, Signal or Threema, all of which offer particularly secure end-to-end encryption, must create and store additional master keys for investigating authorities. With end-to-end encryption, the messaging services themselves cannot see the content of private conversations.
The technology is also used by criminals, according to the current document. “Authorized authorities must be able to legally access the data in certain cases,” the document asks regarding end-to-end encryption.
However, the introduction of end-to-end encryption backdoors is problematic because it could defeat the principle of the technology and make communication between all users less secure.
Matthew Green, an expert in applied encryption and anonymization methods at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, views hardening critically. “Can we have a relaxing weekend?” He wrote on Twitter in reference to the initiative of the EU Council of Ministers.
According to the document, the resolution of the Council of Ministers has been formulated almost in its entirety and voted within the Council. It will be adopted on November 19 in the Working Group for Cooperation in the National Security Sector (COSI);
