Tag: encryption

JD Vance Stops UK Apple Backdoor Order Threatening Americans’ Privacy

Vice President J.D. Vance played a decisive role in persuading the United Kingdom to drop its demand that Apple provide the government with a “backdoor” into personal user data, according to U.S. officials.

The negotiations followed months of quiet but direct engagement between American and British leaders on the matter, as reported by Fox News.

A U.S. official told Fox News Digital that Vance was “in charge and was personally involved in negotiating a deal, including having direct conversations with the British government.”

The official said Vance worked with U.K. partners to negotiate “a mutually beneficial understanding” that led the British government to withdraw the order.

The agreement, the official added, ensures “each country’s sovereignty while maintaining close cooperation on data sharing.”

The vice president’s background in technology, along with his stated commitment to privacy rights and the U.S.-U.K. alliance, shaped his involvement.

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Civil liberties group opposes Garda access to messages

Plans to force encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal to give Gardaí access to private conversations would “profoundly undermine” digital security, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has said.

In a statement issued this week, the group said cybersecurity experts were unanimous that so-called “backdoors” for law enforcement could not be created without also leaving users vulnerable to hackers and malicious actors.

“It is impossible to create ‘backdoor’ access pathways for law enforcement that can’t also be exploited,” the organisation said.

The ICCL added that encryption protects not only personal conversations but also online banking, shopping and wider digital activity.

“We all rely on encryption to safeguard our sensitive personal data when browsing, communicating or doing business online,” it said.

“Forcing companies to break their own encryption would profoundly undermine our digital security, as well as our fundamental rights to privacy and data protection.”

The council cited the position of the United Nations and the European Court of Human Rights in opposing laws that compromise encryption. It also highlighted the recent example of the UK government withdrawing a demand for Apple to install a backdoor into its cloud services, after the company refused.

“Apple stated it had never built – and never would build – backdoor access into any of its encrypted products,” the ICCL noted.

“Instead, Apple disabled its advanced data protection service in the UK and challenged the order in court.”

The group urged Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan to reconsider his planned legislation, describing the proposals as “neither proportionate nor technically sound.”

It called for “transparent consultation with cybersecurity experts, civil society and technologists before proposing any legislation that could irreversibly damage digital privacy and cybersecurity.”

Last month, O’Callaghan told an audience that Gardaí must have powers to intercept modern communications.

“None of us would like to imagine living in a surveillance State,” he said.

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Ireland’s Dangerous War on Encryption

The Irish government’s proposed Communications (Interception and Lawful Access) Bill would significantly expand the state’s ability to monitor digital communications, thereby striking at the very foundation of end-to-end encryption. 

This form of encryption, used by services like WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal, ensures that only the sender and the recipient can access the content of a message. Under the new bill, Gardaí, the Defence Forces, and the Garda Ombudsman would be allowed to intercept private messages in real time. Achieving this would require altering or bypassing encryption entirely.

Such a measure would introduce a permanent vulnerability into digital infrastructure. Once a system is designed to allow access for one party, others can and will exploit it. 

Backdoors do not stay private. They create a single point of failure that can be used by cybercriminals, hostile foreign governments, or commercial spyware operations. 

The government claims that oversight and warrant requirements will ensure the powers are used responsibly. However, no legal safeguard can address the underlying technical risk created by breaking encryption. 

The presence of a backdoor makes every message on a platform more exposed, whether or not it is the target of surveillance. Encryption cannot be selectively weakened. Any interference compromises the security of the system for all users.

Major technology companies have already taken strong positions against laws that would force them to degrade encryption. 

Apple recently removed some of its data protection features from the UK rather than comply with legislation that would have weakened user privacy. 

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Austria Approves Spyware Law to Infiltrate Encrypted Messaging Platforms

Austria is moving forward with legislation that would authorize law enforcement to infiltrate encrypted communications, marking a pivotal shift in the country’s surveillance powers and stirring a fierce debate over digital privacy.

The federal cabinet’s approval of the plan comes after months of negotiations, with proponents citing national security needs and opponents warning of expansive overreach.

The proposed law targets messaging platforms widely used for private communication, including WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.

It introduces the use of spyware, formally known as source TKÜ, which would allow authorities to bypass encryption and monitor conversations directly on suspects’ devices. The change represents a major escalation in surveillance capabilities for a country that has traditionally lagged behind its European counterparts in digital interception laws.

Backers of the measure, such as Social Democrat Jörg Leichtfried, who oversees the Directorate for State Security and Intelligence (DSN), framed the move as a preventative strategy. “The aim is to make people planning terrorist attacks in Austria feel less secure; and increase everyone else’s sense of security.”

Leichtfried called the cabinet’s approval an “important milestone.”

Austria’s domestic intelligence services have until now been dependent on international partners, including the UK and the US, to provide warnings of potential threats.

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Florida Rejects Controversial Encryption Backdoor Bill

Legislators in the US state of Florida have shot down a bid to introduce a law that would have mandated encryption backdoors.

The outcome of the effort – known as SB 868: Social Media Use by Minors – means that the backdoors would have allowed encryption to be weakened in this fundamental way affecting all platforms where minors might choose to open an account.

As the fear-mongering campaign against encryption is being reiterated over and over again, it’s worth repeating – there is no known way of undermining encryption for any one category of users, without leaving the entire internet open and at the mercy of anything from government spies, to plain criminals.

And that affects both people’s communications and transactions.

Not to mention that while framing such radical proposals as needed for a declaratively equally large goal to achieve – the safety of youth online – in reality, by shuttering encryption, young people and everyone else are negatively affected.

If anything, it would make everyone online less secure, and, by nature of the world –  young people more so than others.

And so, Florida’s Senate on announced that SB 868 is now “indefinitely postponed and withdrawn from consideration.”

The idea behind the proposal was to allow law enforcement access to communications on a social platform – by forcing a company to build in backdoors any time law enforcement came up either with a warrant – or merely a subpoena.

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Florida’s New Social Media Bill Says the Quiet Part Out Loud and Demands an Encryption Backdoor

At least Florida’s SB 868/HB 743, “Social Media Use By Minors” bill isn’t beating around the bush when it states that it would require “social media platforms to provide a mechanism to decrypt end-to-end encryption when law enforcement obtains a subpoena.” Usually these sorts of sweeping mandates are hidden behind smoke and mirrors, but this time it’s out in the open: Florida wants a backdoor into any end-to-end encrypted social media platforms that allow accounts for minors. This would likely lead to companies not offering end-to-end encryption to minors at all, making them less safe online.

Encryption is the best tool we have to protect our communication online. It’s just as important for young people as it is for everyone else, and the idea that Florida can “protect” minors by making them less safe is dangerous and dumb.

The bill is not only privacy-invasive, it’s also asking for the impossible. As breaches like Salt Typhoon demonstrate, you cannot provide a backdoor for just the “good guys,” and you certainly cannot do so for just a subset of users under a specific age. After all, minors are likely speaking to their parents and other family members and friends, and they deserve the same sorts of privacy for those conversations as anyone else. Whether social media companies provide “a mechanism to decrypt end-to-end encryption” or choose not to provide end-to-end encryption to minors at all, there’s no way that doesn’t harm the privacy of everyone.

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because we saw a similar attempt from an Attorney General in Nevada last year. Then, like now, the reasoning is that law enforcement needs access to these messages during criminal investigations. But this doesn’t hold true in practice.

In our amicus brief in Nevada, we point out that there are solid arguments that “content oblivious” investigation methods—like user reporting— are “considered more useful than monitoring the contents of users’ communications when it comes to detecting nearly every kind of online abuse.” That remains just as true in Florida today.

Law enforcement can and does already conduct plenty of investigations involving encrypted messages, and even with end-to-end encryption, law enforcement can potentially access the contents of most messages on the sender or receiver’s devices, particularly when they have access to the physical device. The bill also includes measures prohibiting minors from accessing any sort of ephemeral messaging features, like view once options or disappearing messages. But even with those features, users can still report messages or save them. Targeting specific features does nothing to protect the security of minors, but it would potentially harm the privacy of everyone.

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UK Tribunal Blocks Government’s Attempt to Keep Apple Surveillance Case Secret

With a necessary reality check, a UK tribunal has told the government that, no, it cannot hold a secret legal battle against Apple over encryption. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the body meant to oversee the country’s surveillance powers, has dismissed efforts by the Home Office to keep the entire case hidden from public view. And in doing so, it has delivered a quietly important win for press freedom and digital rights. Although, things are far from over.

The case revolves around Apple’s Advanced Data Protection system, or ADP. It’s a security feature that gives users the option to encrypt their iCloud data in a way that even Apple itself cannot access. Not through a backdoor, not with a master key, not at all. It’s the kind of robust end-to-end encryption that governments around the world have grown increasingly nervous about.

The UK, it turns out, is no exception.

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European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy, Framing Mass Surveillance as “Lawful Access”

The EU is once again looking for a way to undermine end-to-end encryption in the name of strengthening law enforcement capabilities, this time via a new strategy, ProtectEU.

The internal security strategy, announced this week by the EU Commission, is presented as a “vision and workplan” that will span a number of years but stops short of making concrete policy proposals.

A press release asserts that the current geopolitical environment is one of “growing” threats from hostile states, and mentions powerful criminal groups and terrorists who are “operating increasingly online” – as well as “surging cybercrime and attacks against our critical infrastructure.”

With the threat elements defined in this way, the EU’s new strategy focuses on six areas, one of them being “more effective tools for law enforcement” – which is where online encryption comes under attack.

When it describes how the groundwork might be laid for mandating encryption backdoors, the EU chooses to use euphemisms such as creating roadmaps for “lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement” and seeking “technological solutions for accessing encrypted data.”

A technology roadmap on encryption would allow for these “solutions” to be found. The EU is not alone in searching for mechanisms to, eventually, legislate against encryption, but these initiatives are invariably met with warnings from both tech companies and civil rights and privacy advocates.

The key issue is that encryption provides both for private communications (which is what law enforcement wants access to) and also the technical security of those communications, financial transactions, etc.

The new EU strategy promises that cybersecurity and fundamental rights will be protected as a future encryption backdoor is implemented.

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Predictable: The Atlantic Praised Signal App as the “Gold Standard” in 2017 and Admitted Obama, Hillary and Trump Staffers All Used It

It wasn’t that long ago that Democrats praised Signal App as the “gold standard” of encrypted messaging.

It was The Atlantic that published the report praising Signal and in the report they admit that Hillary Clinton and Obama staffers used the app.

Despite all of this, Democrats are trying desperately to make “Signalgate” a thing.

The same group that allowed 20 million unvetted illegals into the country want you to think they believe in national security.

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Denver mayor and staff used encryption app to discuss migrant crisis, then auto-deleted messages. Trump policies prompted move, says spokesperson

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and 14 of his top advisors, appointees and lawyers nicknamed themselves “Strike Force” and communicated about the city’s migrant crisis through an end-to end encryption app, CBS News Colorado has learned. The app, Signal, proceeded to automatically delete their initial conversations.

A spokesperson for Johnston said the Signal messaging was prompted by President Trump and how his administration “could have significant impacts on how Denver operates.”

The use of such messaging apps by government officials has been controversial and viewed as a way to avoid public disclosure of government decision making. In Michigan, after state police leaders were found in 2021 to be using Signal on state-issued phones, state lawmakers outlawed the use of encrypted messaging on state phones.

“It’s unlawful and it’s breaking the law,” said Steven Zansberg, a Denver attorney who specializes in First Amendment and open records law, and reviewed some of the records obtained by CBS News Colorado.

Jeff Roberts, director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, characterized what the CBS investigation found as an intentional effort to undermine Colorado’s open records law.

“This is not transparent,” said Roberts.

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