The EU Court ruled that “Backdoors may also be exploited by criminal networks and would seriously compromise the security of all users’ electronic communications. The Court takes note of the dangers of restricting encryption described by many experts in the field.” Any requirement to build in backdoors to encryption protocols for law enforcement agencies could also be taken advantage of by malicious actors.
The EU Court of Human Rights’ also builds on their acknowledgment that “mass surveillance does not appear to have contributed to the prevention of terrorist attacks, contrary to earlier assertions made by senior intelligence officials.”
As the EU Commision’s Chat Control Bill directly targets undermining secure end-to-end encryption, it now looks to be in trouble. In its current version, the Chat Control bill would require the scanning of content on your personal devices, including that which is sent via end-to-end encrypted messenger apps or encrypted email. At some point, providers would be required to either break this encryption to allow the scanning of content or scan content once it has been decrypted and is readable.
On February 13th, Europe received an early Valentine’s gift from the European Court of Human rights when they banned any laws that aims to weaken end-to-end encryption. This ruling is a major stumbling block for the EU Chat Control Bill, but does it really mean that Chat Control is dead? There are many reasons why Chat Control should never become law, we’ve collected the turn of events and steps you can take to help prevent this dangerous bill from ever being passed!
I have said it before and I’ll say it again: Politicians that push for legislation that has previously been ruled as unconstitutional should be charged for willfully trying to literally break the law.
Sounds nice in theory, but it works both ways: It would make political progress very difficult. Imagine a scenario in which e.g. trans rights are being rejected as unconstitutional in the past. The same politicians are then trying again in a different political climate year or decades later. This would be illegal according to your proposal.
Not to mention, it would be fairly trivial to circumvent this by using different politicians from the same party or an aligned interest group.
Then the constitution that would prohibit trans rights would need to be changed first. If politicians want to remove the constitutional right to privacy in order to allow spying on your own constituents, then go ahead and own the fact that you want to undermine the right to privacy. Don’t hide behind “oh, this will totally not affect law-abiding citizens”.
Some social progress such as death penalty abolition or gay marriage often pass with short majorities, and constitutional changes usually require exceptionally large majorities.
Then that’l require more fighting. I however doubt that the constitution of most countries place huge blocks on giving people more freedom.
I don’t understand your point. The problem is not the constitution blocking the change, the problem is that to change the constitution you generally need a much larger majority that is often not achieved when a freedom is not yet widely accepted by the population. So this would block some socially progressive laws too.
Sounds like the constitution would need to be updated in that case. But there has been no successful constitutional challenges for trans-rights, so it wouldn’t apply in this case.
And anyone in position of power/trust should be punished twice, once for the crime and again for doing so in a position of power.