Dear EDRi friend,

We all want safety and security.

In democratic societies, communication systems and devices are vital for our lives and connections with others. Safe and secure communications and devices allow us to work, socialise, organise, express ourselves, and connect with each other. Encryption is great for this!

However, we see more and more attacks on encryption – both by state actors such as law enforcement agencies, or Europol. But new commercial tools such as spyware are also emerging, and with them a whole unregulated market profiteering from exploiting our devices.

This is why today we are launching the KISS campaign - demanding decision-makers to ban spyware and protect encryption. K.I.S.S. stands for Keep it Safe and Secure. We believe safety is security, and security is safety.

We bring together 14 national and international civil society organisations that represent technologists, victims of spyware, journalists and human rights advocates.

Modern spyware is a software that can secretly get everything from your phone: your messages, photos, contacts, location, microphone, camera, and browsing history, without you ever knowing. This turns a personal device into a constant surveillance instrument that follows you in your private life, work, and relationships. At least 14 EU Governments have bought or used spyware, and many private vendors are based in Europe.

If decision-makers allow the commercial spyware industry to continue unhinged, anyone who can pay enough will be able to target activists, politicians, investors, journalists and any of us, basically.

On the other hand, Europol and law enforcement are pushing to legalise hacking methods that weaken encryption. These methods rely on ordering a service provider (those who develop or maintain the software, computer system, network, or electronic device) to build vulnerabilities in their systems. They include clien-side scanning (remember #ChatControl?), key escrows and ghost proposals.

If we lose encryption, we will also lose trust in anything we do online, risking the security of our democratic society, economy and our human rights. We will all be impacted by the chilling effect of unreliable, unsafe communications: journalists engaging with sources or combating disinformation, lawyers consulting their clients, doctors and therapists supporting their patients, human rights defenders chatting online, youth organising protests, families chatting with each other.

Four years ago, in 2022, we started the “Stop Scanning Me” to raise awareness over the CSA draft law, which proposed client-side scanning to circumvent encryption. EDRi and its partners were among the first to sound the alarm, and many others soon joined our call. Soon, the “chat control” broader movement took a life of its own. The CSA proposal is still not finalised and our demands made a massive impact in bringing the draft text closer to protecting encryption.

Together, we managed to have an impact in the past. Let’s do it again.

With power,
The EDRi Team

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