The European Commission announced on Tuesday its intention to join the ongoing debate about lawful access to data and end-to-end encryption while unveiling a new internal security strategy aimed to address ongoing threats. A report written for the European Commission by Sauli Niinistö, the former President of Finland, warned last year that the existing arrangement was “constrained by institutional, legal and political limitations” and led to the failure to optimally address the Russian invasion of Ukraine. ProtectEU calls for the Commission to enhance intelligence-sharing through the EU's Single Intelligence Analysis Capacity (SIAC), effectively a structure for voluntary intelligence sharing by individual member states with its own entirely open source analysis capability. The problem for the European Union is that defense, security and intelligence have always been sovereign matters for each member state, and there is little appetite from those member states’ governments to donate their national capabilities to the bloc. The strategy also announced that the Commission would introduce a new Cybersecurity Act, even as it recognized that Member States had not fully implemented its existing cybersecurity laws within their own domestic legislation. The aim is to “identify and assess technological solutions that would enable law enforcement authorities to access encrypted data in a lawful manner, safeguarding cybersecurity and fundamental rights,” said the Commission. The strategy also sets out objectives and actions that echo uncontroversial assessments of the European Union’s shortcomings, including on a lack of situational awareness and threat analysis at its executive level. ProtectEU, as the strategy has been named, describes the general areas that the bloc’s executive would like to address in the coming years although as a strategy it does not offer any detailed policy proposals. The EU must be bold and proactive in addressing the complex security challenges we face,” stated Henna Virkkunen, the Commission's executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy.
This Cyber News was published on therecord.media. Publication date: Tue, 01 Apr 2025 16:30:11 +0000