New EU effort to control chat: Are messaging services being blocked in Europe?

On September 9, a new version of the globally unprecedented EU law proposal was circulated and leaked, which aims to search all private messages and chats for suspicious content (the so-called Chat Control or Child Sexual Abuse Regulation). POLITICS shortly thereafter.(1) Under the latest proposal, providers would be free to decide whether or not to use “artificial intelligence” to classify unknown images and text chats as “suspicious.” However, they would be required to scan all chats for known illegal content and report it, even at the cost of breaking Messenger’s secure end-to-end encryption. EU governments must vote on the proposal by September 23,(2) and EU interior ministers must approve it by October 10. Messenger providers Signal and Threema have already announced that they will never agree to incorporate such surveillance routines into their apps, preferring to cease operating in the EU.

“Instead of empowering teenagers to protect themselves from sextortion and exploitation by making chat services safer, victims of abuse are being betrayed by an unrealistic bill that, according to the EU Council’s own legal assessment, is doomed to fail in court,” criticized Patrick Breyer, former member of the Pirate Party in the European Parliament and co-negotiator of the European Parliament’s critical position on the bill. “Inundating our police with largely irrelevant tips about old, long-known material will not save victims from ongoing abuse and will actually weaken law enforcement’s ability to tackle predators. Europeans need to understand that they will lose their everyday secure messengers if this bill is implemented – and that means losing touch with their friends and colleagues around the world. Do you really want Europe to become the world leader in tapping our smartphones and mandating indiscriminate blanket surveillance of the chats of millions of law-abiding Europeans?”

Breyer describes the “concession” to limit chat monitoring to so-called “known” illegal content as window dressing: “Regardless of the purpose – imagine if the postal service simply opened every letter and sniffed through it without suspicion. It’s unthinkable. Moreover, it is precisely the current mass screening for so-called known content by Big Tech that is exposing thousands of perfectly legal private chats, overburdening law enforcement, and criminalizing minors en masse.”

Breyer urges EU citizens to contact their governments and representatives now:(3) “In June, under enormous public pressure, a vulnerable blocking minority emerged to save our digital privacy of correspondence and secure encryption. But now, with no regard for government relations, the smallest concessions could be the deciding factor. We have two weeks to persuade our governments to reject chat controls and call for a new, truly effective, rights-respecting approach to keeping our children safer online.(4)”

Sources
(1) Leaked bill for chat control from September 9: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/st12406.en_clean.pdf
(2) Agenda of the meeting: https://www.parlament.gv.at/dokument/XXVII/EU/195500/imfname_11406149.pdf
(3) Breyer’s call to action: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/take-action-to-stop-chat-control-now/
(4) 4-point plan for fundamental revision of the proposal: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-vote-postponed-huge-success/

More information: https://www.chatcontrol.wtf