Another way of determining whether these proposals past the "smell test" is to ask how politicians treat legitimate requests for access to their communications (carried out as part of their jobs, which we pay them for) in response to Freedom Of Information requests.

An example[0] from 2012 in a (then) EU member state is very informative in that regard, as indeed is the name of the special adviser behind the controversial policy.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17235168

I also don't trust my goverment to use the keys only for good purpose, recently in Spain a commissar was paying girls to have sexual contact with influential people to get information about politiceans.

In our case those guys had direct access to police systems, they could look up anything (and they did!). Now imagine if they could also read all your messages. The EU proposal will actually weaken the security of its own citizens. The IT community must fight back.

Yep, also scandals like the one in neighboring Austria where senior government officials were caught on candid camera making deals with fake oligarchs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibiza_affair

Wow that's pretty bad.. Have any decent writeup on it so I can learn more about it?

It's a developing story, I will try to find some got article later. The funny thing is that it all started after one criminal (Marian Kocner) was arrested and his iPhone had the app Threema installed - an E2E encrypted chat. Fortunately for the investigators he had backups enabled and they could access the chat history in plain text. He was in direct contact with government officials including politicians, judges, and so on. And this helped to uncover an even bigger organized group. The whole communication leaked and everyone can read it. You can find passages where he asks to pull specific information from police database. I think maybe 30+ high ranked people are now waiting behind bars for the trial.

Wow, this is a truly fascinating story that I hadn't previously heard about in the US. Here is a good article I found that led me down the rabbit hole:

https://www.dw.com/en/slovakia-arrests-ex-police-chiefs-over...

Government is just another group of people. We currently have few statesmen in politics, only people afraid to loose control and this is a symptom that has haunted us for over 30 years. Any cooperation with the EU on these issue should be denied. Many people are way ahead of constitutions and democratic legitimacy.

encryption for the government

no encryption for the people

sounds like the perfect democratic recipe