Netnod response to the Swedish data storage act

On 7 July 2023 Netnod was given the opportunity by the Ministry of Justice to comment on the consultation of the current regulations on retention of and access to electronic communications data for law enforcement purposes. Netnod is of the firm belief that it is never a good strategy to enforce backdoors in technical products, no matter how well meaning such a suggestion is.

In response to: Netnod response to the Swedish data storage act

Netnod has commented on several aspects of the consultation, but with emphasis on the issues of end-to-end-regulation in the space of vertically separated communications services. The consultation suggests that number independent interpersonal communications can be compared to telephony in terms of control over the message flow and contents. This is simply not true.

The consultation also claims that it is possible for an operator of number independent interpersonal communications services to distinguish communication between people from communication between machines (so called machine-to-machine communication). This is also demonstrably untrue, as the operator of an end-to-end encrypted communications service has no idea of the content or the type of communication it is being used for.

In particular, message bus / message broker services have the potential to become problematic as it is increasingly common to outsource these services to a third party for large software operators.

Netnod is worried that the suggested legislation is a step towards making encryption illegal.