The Joint Declaration was agreed upon at an informal meeting of the European Chiefs of Police in London hosted by the National Crime Agency on 18 April.
Police Chiefs of all EU Member States and Schengen Associated Countries were invited, alongside Europol’s Executive Director.
Here is the declaration (pdf).
There’s not much they can do about PGP, though. Sure, encrypting stuff manually can get a little bit annoying, but nothing a quick browset extension wouldn’t fix.
The moat difficult part will ve convincing your friends to use it, and actually sharing keys, but if you really need to hide what you’re talking about, it’s not like stopping a e2e rollout will help in amy capacity. Quite the contrary - people who they want to target with this will only start to be even more carefull, reaulting in them loosing access even to those backdoored privacy messengers they already probably have and criminals rely on.
What if they make it illegal and jail people whose messages they can’t open?
Once you have a tool that uses pgp with keys you provide, and encrypts messages in normal chats, changing the actuall message format would probably be easy, so there’s plenty of room for adittional steganography. Images would make for a perfect cover, with something like last-bit steganography.
But, I hope it won’t come to that.
They will have tools to scan for steganography. I bet Palantir or some other dodgy tech bro company is more than happy to sell something like that to them. And with PGP’s not only strong encryption, but just as strong authentication, they’ll have no problem whatsoever proving that it was you who sent those illegal encrypted messages.
That’s true. I guess that in this case, your best bet is (assuming you don’t have something so illegal to hide, that they do want to expend large amount of resources on you) to just go security by obscurity, and have some kind of obscure custom steganography that’s not widely used.
And for PGP - I though that there’s a difference between signing and encrypting a message, and when you only encrypt and don’t sign, they can’t attribute the message to you, assuming they don’t have your private key or the original plaintext? Or is it possible to attribute a encrypted message using only public key and cyphertext?
That’s the whole point of making end to end encryption illegal. So, yes, this will happen.