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A New Era of Attacks on Encryption Is Starting to Heat Up


The UK, France, Sweden, and EU have made fresh attacks on end-to-end encryption. Some of the attacks are more “crude” than those in recent years, experts say.

Those privacy and security guarantees have made encryption a target for law enforcement and governments for decades, because officials claim that the protection makes it prohibitively difficult to investigate urgent threats such as child sexual abuse material and terrorism. “We’re seeing some democracies revert back to very crude approaches to circumventing encryption that we maybe thought were something of the past,” Callum Voge, the director of governmental affairs and advocacy at nonprofit Internet Society, says of efforts that could require a backdoor to be created. In December, two officials from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI, encouraged more people to use encrypted communications systems after China’s Salt Typhoon hackers gained deep access to US telecoms providers, exposing unencrypted calls and texts.

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