Draft law on encrypted message surveillance is welcomed by criminal lawyers. At present, responsibility “for internal security is being transferred to foreign security authorities,” criticizes criminal lawyer Farsam Salimi.
After the allegedly foiled attack on a Taylor Swift concert, the question is being discussed again: Should Austria’s state security be able to monitor encrypted messaging services such as Signal and WhatsApp in the future? A draft law from the Ministry of the Interior is currently being reviewed, but there is no time for a decision to be made during this legislative period. The review will therefore not end until September 25, just a few days before the National Council elections.
In the first comments on the draft law on the parliament’s website, criminal lawyers are in favor of the reform. A comparison of the legal situation with other countries such as Germany shows “that neither the Austrian Office for the Protection of the Constitution nor the Austrian criminal prosecution service has modern investigative tools when it comes to monitoring encrypted communications,” writes Susanne Reindl-Krauskopf, head of the Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Vienna.
More than “2.5 billion people worldwide communicate using encrypted WhatsApp alone”: “In addition, there are other services such as Signal, Telegram, EncroChat.” It can therefore be assumed “that the criminal milieu also uses such services to a correspondingly high extent,” says Reindl-Krauskopf.
