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Dutch Government Backs Strong Encryption, Condemns Backdoors

Posted by samzenpus on from the lock-it-down dept.

blottsie writes: The Netherlands government issued a strong statement on Monday against weakening encryption for the purposes of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The move comes as governments in the United Kingdom and China act to legally require companies to give them access to wide swaths of encrypted Internet traffic. U.S. lawmakers are also considering introducing similar legislation.

1 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Most government leaders: Ignorant about technol by coofercat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I complained to my MP (in the UK, where our PM has publicly stated he'd like back doors all over the place) and got a response which essentially said "we invest in strong encryption, we don't advocate weakening encryption at all. However, we do want tech companies to give us access to data when we ask for it".

    In other words - it's all about double-speak. To turn this into slashdot friendly words: "we come in peace. shoot to kill".

    Strong statements are all well and good, but until they also legislate to say (to tech companies) "it's okay to store data in encrypted form that you don't have the keys for", they're not really any different from the other countries of the western world that are keen to snoop on our every move. They're less in-bed with the Americans than we Brits are, so hopefully not quite as pervasive as we are, but apart from scale and efficiency, not that far different.