James Ball

The EU’s muddled approach to encryption

(Photo: iStock)

The EU would like you to know that it doesn’t want to ban encryption. In fact, it correctly recognises that encryption is absolutely essential for our privacy and financial safety on the internet. That’s why a draft resolution – due to be tabled in front of EU leaders at a pivotal summit later this month – spends paragraphs extolling the virtues of online encryption, before setting out the EU’s complaint: they would really like to be able to read encrypted messages. And they want technology companies to do something about it.

On the surface, the EU’s argument might seem quite reasonable: most of us would generally believe that with warrants or similar safeguards, authorities should be able to read the messages of serious criminals or terrorists. This is an argument successive UK governments have also been fond of making.

The problem is that once you scratch below the surface, legislators are essentially proudly proclaiming themselves to be pro-cake and pro-eating it.

Online security is quite different from offline security, in that our communications are ultimately protected by encryption, which boils down to complex mathematics. Encryption uses calculations which are easy to perform one-way round but almost impossible to reverse – the mathematical equivalent of scrambling an egg – which means tech companies can make our messages all but impossible to decipher as they traverse the internet’s network of cables and servers.

In fact, thanks to encryption, the creators of most modern messaging apps can’t read their users’ messages – even if they wanted to. This is crucial for our security and privacy: messages aren’t secure if someone who works for a tech company (or a criminal or spy posing as them) can access them. And it means that when governments or police forces ask tech companies to hand over data, they can’t – they never had it in the first place.

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Written by
James Ball
James Ball is the Global Editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which last month launched a two-year project looking into Russian infiltration of the UK elite and in London’s role in enabling overseas corruption

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