Bad, very bad news for end-to-end encryption advocates in our country, albeit in scope in the rest of the European Union, due to a regulatory movement that threatens to threaten the privacy of all citizens of the common space. According to a leaked document obtained by Wired, the Spanish executive is pushing for its ban in the European Union, the most hard-line position shown by members of the common space.

The context of this document can be found in open debate in the EU for years, which confronts security with privacywhen he claims that the latter, in the form of the use of technologies such as end-to-end encryption, can make it impossible to prosecute a crime, while its defenders, who are generally defenders of privacy, confirm that this type of measure can be put in the hands of anyone, including governments, all kinds of information that should remain strictly private.

According to a document obtained by Wired, the Spanish position is summed up in a truly impressive sentence, Yippee “necessary for us to access the data«position, which is listed in the said document as «Ideally, in our view, it would be desirable to legislatively prevent EU-based service providers from implementing end-to-end encryption.”, which is urging the European Union to ban tech companies from offering products and services that provide end-to-end encryption.

This response from the Spanish executive occurs when Europe is studying measures to combat CSAM, which is precisely one of the most forceful battering rams used by those advocating strict regulation or a complete ban on end-to-end encryption. And this is quite an effective technique, because it is one of the crimes that logically provokes more rejection and more social response.

However, as critics of these measures have argued for many years, your implementation does not solve such a problem, because in the absence of connection privacy, alternative means will quickly be found that will continue to guarantee that their conversations, files, etc. will continue to be hidden from the authorities. However, citizens who have nothing to hide will lose their right to privacy as their communications will be fully visible to security forces and authorities as well as third parties who will be able to access them in a number of ways.

Speaking to Wired, Daniel Campos de Diego, a spokesman for Spain’s Ministry of the Interior, said:the country’s position on the matter is widely known and has been aired publicly on several occasions“, meaning another of many confirmations of the truth of the leaked document and the opinions expressed therein.

Other suggestions, less extreme, represent automatic scanning of files on devices, in line with what Apple proposed with NeuralHash, a proposal that was so widely rejected that it eventually forced those at Cupertino to rule out its implementation. A smaller but still significant part of the European executive argues that these types of measures are too extreme and that the invasion of citizens’ privacy is a red line that should not be crossed.

Get rid of end-to-end encryption, according to experts consulted by Wired, will compromise both user privacy and security without translating into solving the problem at hand. This can be exploited either by disabling it out of necessity or by forcing technology companies to enable backdoors that allow access to communications. cybercriminals, totalitarian governments and spy companiesgroups that would really benefit from a regulation of this type.