Austria is pursuing plans to give police authority to monitor messaging services such as WhatsApp and Skype in an attempt to "close the gap" on criminals who increasingly avoid communicating via telephone.
The government has asked political, technology, civil rights and legal experts to review draft legislation that would give it authority to monitor real-time conversations using new messaging services and applications, Justice Ministry officials told Reuters on Monday.
Such surveillance would be permitted only with a court order in investigations into terrorist activities or other crimes punishable by at least five years in prison, one of the officials said.
Other European countries with similar laws include France, Italy, Poland and Spain, the ministry said.
It was not immediately clear how Austria would conduct such surveillance, though one approach would be to install software on computers and mobile devices of suspects using messaging tools with end-to-end encryption that prevents the government from accessing it using traditional, remote eavesdropping techniques.
Such tools are sold by a handful of firms that specialise in selling off-the-shelf surveillance tools, or spyware, to governments.
"Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are gravitating toward this type of spyware to overcome the challenge of end-to-end encryption," said Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs in Toronto.
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