The EU’s council is once again pushing another Chat Control regulation to allow the police to order internet companies to scan people’s private conversations for supposed illegal content without a warrant.
At its core, the Chat Control bill presupposes that all citizens are suspected child predators or criminals until proven otherwise – a premise that perfectly defines a slippery slope.
Leaked EU note reveals the extent of mass surveillance
In an official document, this one of three points from a note (PDF) for the sixth and potentially final trilogue on the punitive legislation, also known as Chat Control 2.0, set for deliberation on Tuesday 29th September.
Dated September 18, the document was leaked from the Council and is marked as a ‘presidency note’, which means that it’s from EU President, Roberta Metsola.
Behind closed doors, the Council, European Parliament (EP) and the EU Commission (EC) will discuss the bill with the Commissioner for Internal Affairs Magnus Brunner.
Among the key positions, the Council says that limiting searches to specific suspects would “not generate any added value compared to the possibilities already existing under criminal law”. Furthermore, the Council wants to maintain a broad scope for the new bill, including not just illegal photos, text and video content, but new material and the “solicitation of children.”
Based on prior discussions and revelations, the EP is willing to accept an approach that requires “targeted” searches subject to review by independent administrative authorities. The Council wants searches to be “parts of a service or, where possible, to individual users,” which would be supposedly reviewed.
The note reveals that the council desires authority over search reviews while operating “in a manner that does not deter providers from carrying out own-initiative searches.”
As a last resort, the Council will ask member states if they would be willing to drop “own-initiative searches or detection orders on non-public content” from the scope of the regulation – but only if no other compromise can be found “providing at least for the same level of effectiveness as the current voluntary practice.”
The EC Seeks influence over private conversations
The legalese verbiage in the leaked note can be summarised as another attempt to spy on civilian conversations through the back door.
As Former German MEP Patrick Breyer says, the proposal is “mass surveillance by another name,” asserting that the objective of the Council, Commission and some member states is to “permanently normalise mass surveillance across Europe.”
Per Breyer, the idea that scanning would be limited to “parts of a service” is erroneous because it practice it subjects “every user in the EU” to such surveillance.
He emphasises that this system wouldn’t replace the current one, but operate in parallel to existing measures which is already a “proven disaster”. After all, in Germany, over half of investigations target minors for “consensual sexting” while 75 percent of flagged chats are “not actionable.”
The Council own legal service has stated that scanning an entire service or parts of it is “highly probable” to be found “general and indiscriminate” surveillance, and therefore unlawful.
Beyond that, the EC’s push for this bill also demonstrates either a profound lack of technological understanding, or a sneaky method to provide a false sense of security for users, who may believe they’re not being targeted due to the wording of this document.
Claims of targeted surveillance are misleading when the architecture is designed for mass monitoring and abuse by default.
