Encryption Is Getting Squeezed From All Sides

First proposed in 2025, and partially revised due to blistering criticism from tech companies and civil society, Canada’s C-22 bill can broadly place requirements on tech companies, including those outside of Canada, to introduce “technical capabilities” that allow data to be accessed for law enforcement purposes. Like many such bills, C-22 says that companies will not have to introduce a “systemic vulnerability” into their systems. But opponents have pointed out that any capability to access end-to-end encrypted data amounts to a backdoor that could be discovered and abused by anyone. And this risk is only heightened even more by the ease with which anyone can now use AI tools for reverse engineering and system mapping.

“Companies could be asked to introduce vulnerabilities, build backdoors, bypass, weaken or otherwise defeat encryption,” members of the US House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committee said in a May letter to Canadian officials.

In addition to potential impacts on encryption, C-22 also includes provisions that could require companies to retain metadata about user activity, something that many privacy focused services (including VPN services from Psiphon and DuckDuckGo) intentionally avoid. As a result, these companies say, they would be forced to change their business models to collect data they do not need or want to collect about their users. And researchers say that such product changes would diminish user trust while increasing the potential for widespread surveillance.

“If you are asking and requiring for this infrastructural change—that they retain metadata by default—it is creating a surveillance capability within a tool that didn’t have it,” says Afsaneh Rigot, the founder of the De|Center, a research organization that aims to reduce the risk of technological harms. “There are contexts like Iran and other contexts globally, who all of this has a trickle effect on. It’s not going to stay in Canada because these types of laws always get copy pasted around the world.”

As more countries contemplate such laws, developers focused on privacy and anti-censorship tools are increasingly casting around for safe jurisdictions to operate in. But this still doesn’t solve the problem of reaching users in all countries around the world and for now, there are no sure bets.

“Changing your headquarters isn’t much of a plan B when the law follows your users, as C-22 would,” says Joseph Lorenzo-Hall, security portfolio lead at the Internet Society. “The strongest protection is holding as little user data as possible, but ‘we don’t have it’ is no defense if governments can force you to start collecting it. A safe haven needs more than favorable winds in strong encryption. It needs laws that let companies keep their privacy promises and defend them against foreign threats to confidentiality and integrity.”

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