Tutanota is being forced by a German court to develop a backdoor that will be used by authorities to monitor individual mailboxes and read emails in plain text.
The US government has always been remembered for its role in forcing telecom providers into giving it user information after Edward Snowden’s leak. However, they’re not the only ones using such tactics.
In the latest of this sort, a prominent German encrypted email service provider named Tutanota is being forced by a German court to share access of its user emails with local law enforcement authorities to monitor individual mailboxes.
See: ProtonMail denies that it offers real-time surveillance assistance
According to German-language news site Heise Online, with the ruling made by the Cologne Regional Court, the company has already been cornered and has started developing a backdoor that would be used by the “State Criminal Police Office of North Rhine-Westphalia” in monitoring user emails allowing them to read them unencrypted in plain text.
But what led to this?
Apparently, a blackmail email was reportedly sent to an auto supplier by someone using the Tutanota email service. This led the authorities to demand such a function. It is noteworthy that all past emails are secure and cannot be decrypted in any way therefore the choice to continue with the service lies with users.
For the future, all emails will still be encrypted but they can be decrypted if the authorities smell anything suspicious and want to investigate.
Talking about the legal aspect of the ruling, Heise Online encrypted email provider tutanota forced backdoor service
