A German Minister Wants To Ban End-to-End Chat Encryption

An anonymous reader quotes the Next Web:
According to Spiegel Online, the country's Federal Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer, wants encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram to provide chat logs in plain text to the authorities. Since these services come with end-to-end encryption, the companies will have to break the encryption and provide a backdoor to give access to the texts.
Wired adds that "This is obviously incompatible with end-to-end encryption, used by services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram and, if passed, such a law would effectively ban secure encryption for instant messaging." Some commenters on Bruce Schneier's site suggest this is just political grandstanding.

An analysis from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foreign policy think tank, argues that this would be a major change from Germany's stance on encryption over the last two decades:

Instead of focusing on regulating encryption itself, Germany has worked to enable its security agencies to conduct hacking. It has even passed a legal framework tailored to government hacking operations...

The legal debate eventually led to a landmark supreme court ruling emphasizing the government's responsibility for the integrity of information technology systems. The conversation is far from over, with some supreme court cases still pending in regard to recent legislation on the lawful hacking framework.