A letter from the Russian government: Defending encryption in Court
On 13 February 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia's law requiring retention of all Internet communications of all users, the security services’ direct access to the data stored without adequate safeguards against abuse and the requirement to decrypt encrypted communications, as applied to end-to-end encrypted communications, cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society. Our [intervention](https://privacyinternational.org/legal-action/podchasov-v-russia) directly informed this decision.
This week we speak to Ioannis, a senior lawyer at PI, about his and his colleague's work on the landmark case protecting encryption at the European Court of Human Rights: Podchasov v. Russia.
The case dealt with a Russian law obliging telecommunications service providers to indiscriminately retain content and communications data for certain time periods, as well as a 2017 disclosure order by the Russian Federal Security Service requiring Telegram Messenger company to disclose technical information which would facilitate “the decoding of communications”.
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