by jillesvangurp | 2025-09-15 14:12:43+00:00
It should be but the UN declaration on human rights (Article 12) is a bit fuzzy on the topic:

> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1966) states the following in Article 17:

> 1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. > > 2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

The UN declaration on human rights dates back to just after WW II and the ICCPR does not really change anything. Encryption was not widely available and the breaking of things like Enigma was still a state secret. Phone taps were pretty common and the phone system still had human operators that could listen in trivially.

This doesn't mention encryption at all. And that's the problem. It's not covered as a human right under these declarations that lots of countries signed. And of course lots of the signers are taking lots of liberties with these rights. Lawful protection is a very vague label.

Of course, the modern practice of modern business communication happening via things like email, shared files, etc. and the very real risk of foreign nations spying on such communications require a very robust approach to encryption that is generally incompatible with installing back doors and giving arbitrary government agencies wide access to those. Of course such back doors are widely assumed to actually exist anyway but the scope of that is a bit murky. Does the NSA have access to your Google Drive? Maybe, probably. What if you are a business? What if that is hosted in the EU. Probably still yes. It's a valid reason for some EU companies to not want to use Google Drive and a few other US provided tools and infrastructure.

If the back doors leak, you compromise the security communications of all companies and people that use the affected platforms. If that goes unnoticed for a few years, your enemies gain a huge advantage.

When it's Germany vs. the Chinese, Russian, or North Korean intelligence agencies (to give a few practical examples), I'd prefer to not have German government agencies to be the weakest link in my communications. That's the risk that needs balancing.

Even if you trust them to have the right intentions (which is a big if), trusting them to be competent and worthy of that trust is another matter. I'd assume the worst actually. It only takes 1 person to be compromised here for this to go wrong. And with the level of Russian, Chinese, etc. intelligence activity, the only safe assumption is that there are going to be compromised people that will have wide access to information about back doors if not the actual back doors. In fact, for back doors to be useful for policing, a lot of people would need access. Without that level of access, the back doors are pointless. And with that they become a gigantic national security problem.