In a leaked document from the Council of the European Union, arguments for and against end-to-end encryption (E2EE) are compiled. The Spanish government expressed its support for a ban on E2EE, with Poland calling for parents and guardians to have the ability to decrypt their children’s communications and for courts to order decryption. Germany, however, considers attempts to weaken encryption as unacceptable. The document contains submissions from a total of 20 governments, with positions varying greatly. Some countries such as the Netherlands believe an obligation to decrypt information is unnecessary, while Finland and Estonia express concerns about the dangers of weakening confidential communication. Cyprus insists that law enforcement authorities require access to encrypted communication for effective investigations into abuse offenses.
The chat control plan of the EU Commission aims to combat child sexual abuse by obliging service providers to search private communications for conspicuous patterns using technical tools and possibly overturning encryption, affecting chats in encrypted messengers such as WhatsApp, Signal or Threema. For months, Germany had been divided on its stance on screening private communications, but the government is now united against it. The submitted text must be changed before the federal government can accept it. A high level of data protection and cyber security is fundamental and must not be compromised. No technologies should be used to disrupt, weaken, circumvent or modify encryption.
