EU Encourages Police Hacking

The Council of the European Union suggests member countries allow police to remotely access personal computers — in other words, hacking.

A new, broad plan from the Council of the European Union on fighting cybercrime has suggested letting police remotely access personal computers, according to the BBC.

More than that, it turns out that Britain, which has signed up to the plan, already has legislation allowing this under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, and conducted 194 of these searches last year.

However, cybercrime expert Professor Peter Sommer from the LSE told the BBC:

"The products are out there, they’ve been available for quite a long time and they are pretty sophisticated, however they probably aren’t going to get used very much.”

Hacking evidence could also affect court cases, he pointed out.

"Normally, when computers are examined forensically, a great deal of care is taken to ensure that nothing is written to the computer when the examination is taking place. Once you start looking at a computer remotely, all of those controls vanish."