The European Court of Human Rights has banned a general weakening of secure end-to-end encryption, a move that could jeopardize Canada’s international trade relations.
The EU recently renewed Canada’s adequacy status, an important measure to facilitate continued international trade and information sharing between Canada and European nations and companies, but proposed federal legislation could put that in jeopardy, with significant economic impacts.
As MEP Dr Patrick Breyer explains, “The judgement argues that encryption helps citizens and companies to protect themselves against hacking, theft of identity and personal data, fraud and the unauthorised disclosure of confidential information. Backdoors could also be exploited by criminal networks and would seriously jeopardise the security of all users’ electronic communications. There are other solutions for monitoring encrypted communications without generally weakening the protection of all users, the Court held. The judgement cites using vulnerabilities in the target’s software or sending an implant to targeted devices as examples.”
“With this outstanding landmark judgement, the ‘client-side scanning’ surveillance on all smartphones proposed by the EU Commission in its chat control bill is clearly illegal. It would destroy the protection of everyone instead of investigating suspects. EU governments will now have no choice but to remove the destruction of secure encryption from their position on this proposal – as well as the indiscriminate surveillance of private communications of the entire population!”
In view of this ruling, Canada will have to reconsider the privacy and international trade implications of Bills C-26, C-27, and S-210 — which have explicit or implicit requirements and outcomes that would be contrary to the EU ruling.
