Austrian lower house passes bill on monitoring of secure messaging

VIENNA (Reuters) -Austria's lower house of parliament passed a bill on Wednesday to allow the monitoring of suspects' secure messages, in limited cases, which security officials have said would close what is a dangerous policing blind spot.

Because Austria lacks a legal framework for monitoring messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal, its main domestic intelligence service and police rely on countries with far more sweeping powers, such as Britain and the United States, to alert them to chatter about planned attacks and spying.

That kind of tip-off led to police unravelling what they said was a planned attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, which prompted the cancellation of all three of her planned shows there in August of last year.

"There are no ideological reasons behind this," conservative Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said, defending the bill put forward by the ruling coalition of three centrist parties.

"It is simply necessary for the work of the police, the work of the intelligence services to fight terrorists on a level playing field and prevent attacks," he said.

The two opposition parties in parliament, the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) and the Greens, voted against the bill, arguing that it would lead to wider spying on the population than intended.

The government has said the monitoring would only be used on people posing a major threat, with a target of up to 30 a year, and each case would have to be approved by a three-judge panel.

FPO lawmaker Gernot Darmann called it "an excessive, massively overreaching encroachment on our citizens' fundamental rights and freedoms".

Once the legislation clears the upper house and is signed into law, a tender process for the monitoring technology underpinning it will be launched, and monitoring should begin in 2027, the government has said.

(Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Alex Richardson)