Brussels, 11/11/2020 – On Monday the Austrian National Service Broadcaster (ORF) published a secret draft of a planned Council resolution seeking to undermine encryption. According to the resolution, messaging services such as Whatsapp are to allow governments to decrypt and intercept secure online communications. Pirates call on responsibility of representatives of the public services to uphold and protect the fundamental right to privacy as well as the security of our digital communications infrastructure.
We also call on YOU, Internet users, to contact their governments in advance of tomorrow’s deadline (12:00) for input.
The proposal stands in line with regular attacks by governments on the secure encryption of content, made under the guise of the fight against organized crime and terrorism.
“There is no such thing as a ‘partial backdoor’ to online communications. The security of all our communications must be given priority. This has been the clear position of the European Parliament since 2017, and it is also the biggest priority of the Pirates,” says Marcel Kolaja, Pirate Vice-President of the European Parliament.
“Contrary to what governments would have us believe, we have to choose between interception and security. Those who want to sacrifice secure encryption in order to enable eavesdropping will destroy the protection of private secrets, business secrets and state secrets, and open the door to mass-spying by foreign intelligence services as well as hacker attacks,” explains Pirate Patrick Breyer, German MEP.
“It is technically impossible to grant access to securely encrypted communications solely for ‘lawful’ purposes. As soon as messaging services allow for the decryption of private communications, for instance by implementing backdoors or providing master keys, the security of communications is broken once and for all – not only for the ‘legitimate’ purposes envisioned by the national governments,” adds Mikuláš Peksa, MEP and chairperson of European Pirate Party.
“Contrary to what is argued by the Presidency, there is no middle-way between upholding the ‘fundamental rights and the digital security of governments, industry and society’ and the breaking of secure end-to-end encryption. Therefore, we demand strict rejection of the proposal by the national government’s representatives. We ask European citizens to help us now and contact their governments immediately,” stresses Markéta Gregorová, Czech Pirate MEP.
That is why we prepared the letters which can help you with contacting your Permanent representations of the EU in each country. Moreover, we translated the text into a few European languages.
For every translation, we added the e-mail address of your specific Permanent representations of the EU. Feel free to use it and ask for redirecting the letter to the specific governments!
PS: DO NOT FORGET TO ADD YOUR SIGNATURE IN THE END OF THE LETTER.
Main ENGLISH version of the letter.
GERMAN version – send it to: info@bruessel-eu.diplo.de
CZECH version – send it to: eu.brussels@embassy.mzv.cz
FRENCH version – send it to: courrier.bruxelles-dfra@diplomatie.gouv.fr
GREEK version – send it to: mea.bruxelles@rp-grece.be
SLOVAK version – send it to: eu.brussels@mzv.sk
SPANISH version – send it to: reper.bruselasue@reper.maec.es
ITALIAN version – send it to: rpue.rpue@esteri.it
ESTONIAN version – send it to: permrep.eu@mfa.ee
ICELANDIC version – send it to: Delegation-Iceland@eeas.europa.eu
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