EU Presses Tech Companies over Surveillance, Security

European Union officials are pressing big US tech companies to free up surveillance access to their user data in the wake of November’s attacks in Paris, marking a continued shift in the debate over privacy and security within the bloc. Firms including Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet’s Google were meeting on Dec 3 with a raft of government and law-enforcement officials from the EU and member states including France to discuss deepening their cooperation in fighting terrorism, people familiar with the meetings said.

Government officials and tech executives say the meetings -- including one in Paris with French Prime Minister Manuel Valls and another in Brussels dubbed the EU Internet Forum -- focus in large part on how tech firms can move more swiftly to remove propaganda and recruitment messages by Islamic State and other terror groups from social-media websites. But EU officials are also raising a more divisive topic: Whether tech firms should build back doors into encryption tools that could be used by terrorists to plan future attacks. “Communication between terrorists is increasingly taking place using highly sophisticated encryption techniques and this needs to be addressed,” one EU official said ahead of the meeting.