Hypocrisy is not something our governments are immune from, and the words of commissioner Johansson are not encouraging:

> She wants tech companies to face mandatory detecting and reporting obligations

> “The problem is that many of these communications are now being end-to-end encrypted,” she said, whereby only the users exchanging messages have access to the content.

> While encryption is "really important," she said, "we don't want pedophiles to be able to do whatever they want, to not be seen, we have to protect [children] so this is not an easy challenge to tackle.”

https://www.politico.eu/article/encryption-could-hinder-chil...

As long as politicians pretend that you can have both I'll assume they are either disingenuous or ignorant and I won't be at ease.

That only means that the EU is confident it can break Signal's encryption if the need arises.

Which, of course, is actually an argument AGAINST using Signal.

In recent months they also promised to strengthen law and access to privacy and anonymity, make it a human right. Talk is cheap.

> ...has already announced a follow-up regulation to make chat control mandatory for all email and messaging providers. Previously secure end-to-end encrypted messenger services such as Whatsapp or Signal would be forced to install a backdoor.

It's easy to recommend "end-to-end" when you're about to force a backdoor into it.

>It's easy to recommend "end-to-end" when you're about to force a backdoor into it.

I'm not surprised that HN readers think politicians are all so dumb that they recommend their own staff use Signal and then recommend to break Signal. This kind of news pop up all the time and in almost all instances it turns out it isn't what is actually happening. Discussing it on HN -especially when it is the EU, Russia or China- is a complete waste of time as almost every single comment is low effort or trolling. We all know that the EU won't have backdoored Signal any more today than the next ten times this gets discussed on HN. It's all smoke and mirrors.

> We all know that the EU won't have backdoored Signal any more today than the next ten times this gets discussed on HN. It's all smoke and mirrors.

How can you say that it's not only the stated goal but they have been making real progress towards it?

Real progress would be something that can force Moxie Marlinspike, who lives in the US, to introduce a backdoor.

They can't easily shut the service down without risking a lot of unwanted public attention. When "why can't I message grandma" is answered with "here's the list of politicians that caused that because they want to spy on your messages", those politicians will have a bad time. I think Signal is popular enough in Europe to be protected by this.