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In reality, the EU interior ministers wanted to speak exclusively about migration on Friday, for good reason. After all, EU countries have been arguing over a common immigration policy for years, largely without success. But someone seemed to have forgotten a not entirely insignificant detail during the planning: Exactly five years ago, Islamist terrorists murdered 130 people in Paris.
A commemorative event was held in Paris, “and we don’t want to start until it’s finished,” Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said. That is why the meeting was postponed for two hours. In any case, in view of the recent attacks, the EU interior ministers could be “impossible to meet without talking about the security situation”, migratory or not.
That set the tone, it was mainly the fight against terrorism, and in this sense a lot is about to happen. In the future, terrorist content on the Internet should be removed “as quickly as possible”, if possible within an hour of its appearance, says Seehofer. The “most urgent wish” at the ministerial meeting was to conclude the relevant negotiations with the EU Commission and the European Parliament this year. Also in the Schengen area, where it is possible to travel without border controls, security must be increased, among other things, through better information exchange and stricter controls at the external borders of the EU.
Seehofer wants “every intelligence opportunity”
Probably the most explosive point is that the EU states also demand access to encrypted communication from their citizens, for example, with messaging services such as WhatsApp or Signal.
Member states would have to address this issue “so that digital evidence can be legally collected and used by the competent authorities,” said a statement from the ministers that circulated on Friday. Seehofer became clearer after the meeting. “Personally, I am in favor of us making use of all the intelligence services that are theoretically at our disposal,” said the CSU politician.
It was not clear what exactly Seehofer and the other ministers had in mind. There are more details in two confidential documents that were leaked in recent days and caused quite a stir. These are drafts of a resolution of the EU states on the treatment of encryption technology and of resolutions on internal security and police association.
Access to electronic evidence is “essential” for successful investigations, according to one of the two documents that SPIEGEL has at its disposal. The increasingly widespread encryption of communication makes content analysis “extremely difficult or virtually impossible, although access to such data would be legal.” Therefore, as it is stated in both documents, “technical solutions for legal access to encrypted data” are needed. The documents were drawn up by the German government, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU.
The reason is that most messaging services now offer end-to-end encryption. Messages are encrypted on the sender’s device and only decrypted on the recipient’s device. Data cannot be read on the fly or just with great effort.
Therefore, law enforcement authorities have long requested master keys from communication providers. The two EU documents now assume this requirement: solutions for data access, it says there, must be developed together with the industry. The “reliability of products” must be preserved. A spokesman for Seehofer’s ministry also stressed that “under no circumstances should encryption systems be weakened.”
A small back door is not possible
Critics consider this a contradiction in terms. Their argument: encryption is only trustworthy if no one can beat it. “A master key for messaging services would undermine the basic principle of this instrument,” says Klaus Landefeld of the Echo Internet Industry Association. Since the distribution of a master key cannot be controlled, there would be “uncontrolled access by countless domestic and foreign consumers and secret services to communication between EU citizens”.
Seehofer, on the other hand, is upset that “after all these brutal attacks there is always an immediate discussion,” that the authorities may not have done enough or acted too slowly. “I no longer want to just accept such discussions,” Seehofer said. “We are often denied the necessary powers.”
However, the problem is usually not a lack of data, it is not being used. It happens time and again that authorities are aware of attackers, such as Anis Amri, who drove a truck to a Berlin Christmas market in 2016 and killed twelve people. The Syrian who attacked two people with a knife in Dresden in early October and killed one of them had also been classified as an Islamist threat for three years.
In the EU, however, there is not even a common definition of what constitutes a hazard. That can definitely become a problem, because after all it is about measures against people who may not have been guilty of anything. Ministers should be discussing this issue on Friday. But that was not done, Seehofer explained, “for reasons of time.”
