Asked whether she sees the need to safeguard encryption in order to boost consumers’ trust in digital services, Gabriel began by appearing to support guarantees that strong encryption should not come with the risk of any government backdoors ultra v lift.
“At the moment it’s important to have encryption,” she said. “It’s a guarantee for security without any possible backdoors. We’ve already seen member states initiatives where they’ve used the deciphering of the encryption — and we’ve seen the results of that. So we need to move forward. Trust, confidence and security for citizens will come from a number of measures, but that’s a principle where I propose that we move along the same lines.”
But asked in a follow-up to commit that there will be “no such legal access provided” to (backdoor) e2e encryption, she rowed back virtual office.
“Legal access can only take place within very strict conditions, as we have for other legislative measures. And only where it concerns reasons of national security of the highest rank,” she said. “So I think on that point we need to make sure that we’re consistent with the other pieces of legislation that we have — and at the same time establish a clear principle.
“It’s important because we need to give our own institutions the means to move forward, but we also need to make sure that those very same instruments are not being used by others for purposes other than the positive purposes that we had in mind ICT Solutio