This intervention offers an analysis of the current politics around encryption and related implications. Encryption is a key element of the existing and emerging communications networks and infrastructures and crucial for enactment of privacy-by-design principles. While many might know that the current crypto-tensions are re-iterating the so-called crypto-wars of the 1990s, the issue goes much further back in the history: there were bans on the use of the “coded language” already in the era of the telegraph – the technology that some termed “the Victorian Internet”. In our times anti-encryption aspirations have been tamed by the states’ economic interests, since that would compromise various key economic activities. Lately, more interests competing with those of securitisation agenda have been emerging, e.g. related to the functioning of the e-government. Besides, the debate is complemented by arguments linking cryptology to the freedom of speech. As noted by the ENISA’s chief U. Helmbrecht, the US restrictions put on the use of strong encryption in the 1990s fired back. Data breaches and hacking attacks have become a sweeping new normal. The current wave of anti-encryption agenda has seen a number of top political level opponents on both sides of the Atlantic and was condemned by the UN. In Europe, the possibility to enshrine obligations of wider application of encryption is going to be a hot topic during the just launched e-Privacy Directive reform. At the same time, the Council of Ministers, led on this issue by Germany and France, is looking into the ways for legislative workarounds for the existing encryption-related challenges. Meanwhile, scientific progress promises “uncrackable” encryption such as “twisted light” enabled quantum cryptography, now being tested even in satellite transmissions – one of the least interception-proof communications systems. It is then to be seen what legal and regulatory terrain these technological advances will find.
