European Governments Really Hate Security

And privacy. They are not too fond of privacy, either. From Arstechnica we get a story of encryption designed to government specifications. Encryption made for police and military radios may be easily cracked

Two years ago, researchers in the Netherlands discovered an intentional backdoor in an encryption algorithm baked into radios used by critical infrastructure–as well as police, intelligence agencies, and military forces around the world–that made any communication secured with the algorithm vulnerable to eavesdropping.

The algorithm in question European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), who then recommended a work-around, which also has a problem with encryption.

But now the same researchers have found that at least one implementation of the end-to-end encryption solution endorsed by ETSI has a similar issue that makes it equally vulnerable to eavesdropping.

It is almost like the ETSI, and the governments that pay the bills, don't like the idea of encryption and privacy.

All four TETRA encryption algorithms use 80-bit keys to secure communication. But the Dutch researchers revealed in 2023 that TEA1 has a feature that causes its key to get reduced to just 32 bits, which allowed the researchers to crack it in less than a minute.

Strong encryption algorithms have been known, and implemented in audited code, for a long time. There is absolutely no reason for this kind of thing.

While the old saying is "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action," this is not the first time that governments and other large bureaucracies have worked to undermine privacy and/or security.

So who is it that hates the very idea of privacy? Despots. Which is begining to seem like that term describes the governments of the European Union.