On Monday a new version of the globally unprecedented EU bill aimed at searching all private messages and chats for suspicious content (so-called chat control or child sexual abuse regulation) was circulated and leaked by POLITICO soon after. According to the latest proposal providers would be free whether or not to use ‘artificial intelligence’ to classify unknown images and text chats as ‘suspicious’. However they would be obliged to search all chats for known illegal content and report them, even at the cost of breaking secure end-to-end messenger encryption. The EU governments are to position themselves on the proposal by 23 September, and the EU interior ministers are to endorse it on 10 October. Messenger providers Signal and Threema have already announced that they will never agree to incorporate such surveillance routines into their apps and would rather shut down operations in the EU.

‘Instead of empowering teens to protect themselves from sextorsion and exploitation by making chat services safer, victims of abuse are betrayed by an unrealistic bill that is doomed in court, according to the EU Council’s own legal assessment,’ criticises Patrick Breyer, former Pirate Party Member of the European Parliament and co-negotiator of the European Parliament’s critical position on the proposal. ‘Flooding our police with largely irrelevant tips on old, long known material will fail to save victims from ongoing abuse, and will actually reduce law enforcement capacities for going after predators. Europeans need to understand that they will be cut off from using commonplace secure messengers if this bill is implemented – that means losing touch with your friends and colleagues around the world. Do you really want Europe to become the world leader in bugging our smartphones and mandating untargeted blanket surveillance of the chats of millions of law-abiding Europeans?’

Breyer describes the ‘concession’ to restrict chat monitoring to supposedly ‘known’ illegal content as window-dressing: ‘Regardless of the objective – imagine the postal service simply opened and snooped through every letter without suspicion. It’s inconceivable. Besides, it is precisely the current bulk screening for supposedly known content by Big Tech that exposes thousands of entirely legal private chats, overburdens law enforcement and mass criminalises minors.’

Breyer is calling on EU citizens to contact their governments and representatives now: ‘In June, under massive public pressure, there was a fragile blocking minority to save our digital privacy of correspondence and secure encryption. But now, with no spotlight on government dealings, minimal concessions could tip the scales. We have two weeks to make our governments reject chat control and call for a new, truly effective and rights-respecting approach to keeping our children safer online.’

Further information: chatcontrol.wtf/en/feed

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