So, this press release just dropped:
This week Europol launched an innovative decryption platform, developed in close cooperation with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. It will significantly increase Europol’s capability to decrypt information lawfully obtained in criminal investigations.
The launch of the new decryption platform marks a milestone in the fight against organised crime and terrorism in Europe. In full respect of fundamental rights and without limiting or weakening encryption, this initiative will be available to national law enforcement authorities of all Member States to help keep societies and citizens safe and secure. A virtual inauguration ceremony brought together senior representatives from Europol, the European Parliament, the Council of the EU and the Commission.
https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/europol-and-european-commission-inaugurate-new-decryption-platform-to-tackle-challenge-of-encrypted-material-for-law-enforcement
Now my gut reaction when anyone refers to “the launch of a new platform” with glowing descriptions and prescriptive outlook, is to remember Geoffrey James’ “Tao of Programming” – but this is more important than mere nerd flippancy, and so worthy of some deeper consideration.
The announcement continues:
Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) will operate the platform and leverage its in-house expertise in providing the most effective support to national Member State investigations.
q.v.
…which links to a fairly terrifying page, with some particularly egregious military-code-word-security-cyber-spooky-stuff:
So, basically, this sounds something along the lines of “we bought a whole pile of GPUs and/or rented them from somewhere, and we’re announcing it before Christmas so that people know that we are ‘doing something about cyber™’“
But why would that be interesting? Why announce something? And why now?
Gut feeling, followed by a wild, unsubstantiated guess: this is not a capability which one would normally announce. Stuff like this is very nerdy, and best kept in-house. Therefore it is being announced for a “soft goal”, done for the sake of being seen to be done.
What’s a good soft goal? Well, based upon my corporate (rather than Government) experience, there are two obvious options:
- “We have budget that we have to spend, and which we have to be seen to be spending, so that we can get the same or increased budget, next year”; or, more interestingly…
- Someone with an ounce of sense regarding strategic face-saving, is looking at all the European Commission-led brouhaha regarding “We need to have good security IN SPITE of good security, oh, wait, did I say security? I meant ‘encryption’, of course” – and is announcing this in order to have a face-saving programme in the (likely? I hope likely) instance that all of that political sound and fury, comes to nothing.
Number 2 is particularly interesting to me because the European Commission is called-out on the press release headline; I can’t imagine that as happening on a more mundane, geek- or budget-led press release. Hence thinking that the EC want to be seen to be taking a diversity of approaches towards encryption.
Maybe I am wrong, so perhaps someone who knows more about the operations of Europol press releases, can comment? Anonymously, via Strong Encryption and Tor, if desired?
[1] This:
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