After Sunday‘s European elections, the EU is planning to reintroduce indiscriminate communications data retention without suspicion and force manufacturers to allow law enforcement access to digital devices such as smartphones and cars.
Specifically, according to the 42-point surveillance plan, manufacturers are to be legally obliged to make digital devices such as smartphones, smart homes, IoT devices, and cars monitorable at all times (“access by design”). Messenger services that were previously securely encrypted are to be forced to allow for interception.
The secure encryption of metadata and subscriber data is to be prohibited. Where requested by the police, GPS location tracking should be activated by service providers (“tracking switch”).
The EU Commission has already contributed specific proposals to the surveillance plan, according to two presentations obtained by the Pirates.
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This simply won’t work and the implications and risks are too great to allow such a blasphemy. If a backdoor is built in every device, how do you guarantee the security ? This means anyone with enough skills and knowledge can abuse these types of backdoors.
This would set a very dangerous and dystopian precedent.
Thats only the „what if“. You always have to entertain the thought that your country gets taken over by non democratic forces. That then? They dont need any „what ifs“ they are legally allowed to spy on us and enabled by our own tech then. Who had genocide on steroids for 2025?
Don’t assume that the European commissioners and their staffs know what they are doing or understand these matters. The depth of their collected knowledge could easily be documented in a single Powerpoint. And with not too many slides. And Ylva Johansson is well known for being both ignorant and utterly manipulated by lobbyists.