Austrian Government Agrees On Plan To Allow Monitoring of Secure Messaging

Austria's coalition government has agreed on a plan to enable police to monitor suspects' secure messaging in order to thwart militant attacks, ending what security officials have said is a rare and dangerous blind spot for a European Union country. From a report: Because Austria lacks a legal framework for monitoring messaging services like WhatsApp, its main domestic intelligence service and police rely on allies with far more sweeping powers like Britain and the United States alerting them to chatter about planned attacks and spying.

That kind of tip-off led to police unravelling what they say was a planned attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, which prompted the cancellation of all three of her planned shows there in August of last year. 'The aim is to make people planning terrorist attacks in Austria feel less secure - and increase everyone else's sense of security,' Joerg Leichtfried of the Social Democrats, the junior minister in charge of overseeing the Directorate for State Security and Intelligence (DSN), told a news conference.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.