Catenaa, July 07, 2025-The European Union has outlined an ambitious plan to enable law enforcement agencies to decrypt private data by 2030, as part of its newly unveiled ProtectEU strategy.
The announcement was made with the release of the EU Commission’s official Roadmap, a sweeping document detailing efforts to bolster internal security amid mounting digital threats.
The strategy stems from the work of the High-Level Group under the “Going Dark” initiative, which identified end-to-end encryption as the main hurdle for law enforcement.
The Roadmap outlines six key areas of focus, including extending data retention obligations, improving cross-border interception measures, advancing digital forensics, and developing AI-driven investigative tools. Crucially, it also signals a 2026 release of a Technology Roadmap to identify decryption methods, with a target to equip Europol officers with those tools by 2030.
Privacy experts warn the move could weaken digital security and introduce backdoors into encryption systems, which they argue could be exploited by malicious actors. Robin Wilton of the Internet Society said efforts to decrypt data often introduce critical vulnerabilities.
Despite growing resistance from cryptographers and civil liberties groups, the Commission maintains the need to balance security with privacy. The plan follows prior failures to push through similar legislation like the “Chat Control” bill.
Critics argue the strategy contradicts the EU’s past endorsement of strong encryption as vital to protecting cyberspace, with cybersecurity specialists cautioning that weakening encryption could do more harm than good.
