The HLG maintains that law enforcement authorities face increasing operational challenges when seeking to lawfully access data digitally generated, processed or stored in a readable format. 47% of respondents to the most recent annual survey of the SIRIUS project on Cross-Border Access To Electronic Evidence identified the lack of data retention as the predominant challenge they faced, and already in 2018 it was estimated that by 2019 more than 22 percent of global messaging was estimated to be end-to-end encrypted and inaccessible to law enforcement. The HLG identified the lack of an adequate legal framework to perform lawful interception on non-traditional telecommunications services to also have significant consequences for law enforcement action: more than 90% of messaging passes through such Over-The-Top (OTT) services.

I’d actually be pretty impressed if 22 percent of global messaging used end-to-end encryption in 2019. Pleased, but surprised.

Email needs PGP or X.509 certs, and I don’t think that there’s much use there. I don’t think that any of the major social media sites have clients that use end-to-end encryption, and moreso not in 2019. SMS isn’t end-to-end encrypted.

Like, most end-to-end encrypted software packages that I can think of are specifically aimed at people who have sought out end-to-end encryption, and there aren’t many of those.