The reason is, and always has been, to enable lazy police work. They won't have to do their jobs if facebook will just tell them who the criminals are.
Another way of phrasing this might be "people will not have to pay as much tax if technological tools are used to assess crimes rather than traditional high-touch policing (ie high man-hours)".
Generally people want all the [other] criminals catching, but do not want all resources of the state used solely for policing. Optimisations then are preferred even if there is collateral harm.
In goriest form, I think of this as the drone argument.
Is it better to put boots on the ground, some of whom may die and who may cause collateral casualties in executing their mission, or a (hypothetically idealized) drone that kills only the target?
Still haven't decided if I have, or there even exists, a good answer to that.
The answer is yes. Murdering other humans who have no way to see it coming and no way to defend themselves is deeply evil. Especially when you factor in the murder of innocents (also referred to as collateral damage), and the facts that mistakes happen.
But people are people. They get nervous/scared in situations. Maybe the boots on the ground snap and murder a bunch of civilians they thought were threatening.
A perfect drone wouldn't do that.
But on the other hand, a perfect drone has no cost of use, other than monetary. Which seems far too low a bar to set for the seriousness of taking a life.
Send police to deal with the situation. If that is not possible for some reason, then that is the problem that needs fixing. You don't need murderbots.
It's never impossible, but in e.g. a hostage situation, this may result in a lot more innocent deaths.
I suppose a better question would be, why do you feel that in this particular situation - a murderer on rampage - you still feel that it is "deeply evil" to kill them in such a way that they "have no way to see it coming", to the point where you'd prefer other people to risk lives to do it in some other way?
State of the art encryption has become so widespread and well known that anyone with the tiniest interest in privacy can download one of the hundreds of open source E2EE messaging platforms to use for their criminal activities.
This line of thinking has always struck me as extremely odd - as soon as current, presumably E2EE, methods of communication are tapped into for intelligence and law enforcement purposes, criminals can and will switch to projects that don't comply with the backdoor laws. It's a violation of privacy that only law-abiding citizens will be subject to, for everyone else it's optional.
You might catch a wave of them off guard in the beginning, but in the long term all you end up doing is surveilling innocent people and maybe catching lowest hanging fruit - the types of people who are already dumb enough to share their criminal activities on Facebook.
That goes way beyond the scope of legislation in question. Suggesting that something akin to the great firewall of china could be deployed in the EU is unrealistic - having said that, it sure feels surreal when expression and support of these authoritarian ideas by EU representatives doesn't lead to immediate political suicide.
First, I was being sarcastic. But in terms of "political suicide", remember that politicians a) have info we don't, b) have fear mongering elements screaming in their ears, and c) have surveillance lobbyists taking them out to dinner.
It would likely break dozens of individual member state laws protecting freedom of speech, privacy, net neutrality, and the scope of policing powers which would have to be changed or grossly violated. This seems, to me, culturally and politically untenable on a national level because the population at large hasn't been condition to accept iron fist authoritarian rule and gross violations of their personal liberties.
Actual criminals don’t only communicate with just other criminals. They actually have to get out and do crime… So police can catch them the way they always did, when things were organised by talking together in private when nobody else could listen to them.
Ever think there aren't as many pedophiles as you think? Maybe many have their own children to abuse or organizations with trust, like the church, in which encryption doesn't mean anything.
