The CEO of Signal said Tuesday that the service will leave Sweden rather than comply with a rule that will require vendors to capture all secure messages and save a plain text copy, in case authorities later want to subpoena that data, .
But the issue goes far beyond one secure messaging company and one government’s regulators. The European Union is considering similar regulations (many of them requiring backdoors to the data, which is even more problematic than simply saving a copy), as are the UK, France, and several other jurisdictions, including the US. If enough of those regulators insist on being able to access secure communications, it raises the issue of whether encrypted communications can be effectively used by any business.
“In practice, this means that we are asked to break the encryption that is the foundation of our entire operation. Asking us to store data would undermine our entire architecture, and we would never do that. We would rather leave the Swedish market entirely,” Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker told a Swedish news organization. “If we create a vulnerability based on Swedish demands, it would create a way to undermine our entire network.”
