Interesting. Does these almost same-time publications are a coincidence? I tend to doubt it.
Both law enforcement bodies in Europe and Australia publicly turn to the private market, with focus on Social Media, asking it to ease its end-to-end encryption (E2EE), so law enforcement can read relevant data, for law enforcement reasons.
In my view this can mostly one of two:
1. Law enforcement has a real problem here
2. Law enforcement has the ability to overcome end-to-end encryption (E2EE) so they use these publications to pretend to be helpless against it, hence building the criminals/enemies confident that these platforms are safe for them, so they will act freely in them and so the law enforcement bodies will be able to spy on them
If it is the first reason – then I think it looks like we are escalating towards a clash.
News article
“Police Chiefs Call for Solutions to Access Encrypted Data in Serious Crime Cases”
The Europol post about it
The declaration (PDF file)
News article
“The director general of Australia’s lead intelligence agency and the commissioner of its Federal Police yesterday both called for social networks to offer more assistance to help their investigators work on cases involving terrorism, child exploitation, and racist nationalism.”