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EU backs down on chat control
EU Council has withdrawn the vote on its controversial Chat Control plan, which would have severely undermined end-to-end encryption.
A t the start of 2022, the EU Commission proposed the Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse. Its stated aims were to prevent the distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online. But the proposed methods caused controversy.
Meredith Whittaker, president of secure messaging service Signal, said as much in a statement released on 17th June entitled “New branding, same scanning.”
Whittaker pointed out that in November 2023, the EU Parliament voted to exclude endto-end encryption from mass surveillance. However, the demand for client-side scanning arose under the name “upload moderation”.
The EU narrative seems to run along the lines that end-to-end encryption isn’t compromised by this kind of monitoring, as files and messages are scanned prior to being encrypted.
Whittaker called out this kind of “rhetorical games”, pointing out that any monitoring of this kind “fundamentally undermines encryption”.
Posting on eX-Twitter, Edward Snowden also stated, “EU apparatchiks are trying to legislate a terrible mass surveillance measure, despite universal public opposition (no sane person wants this), by inventing a new word for it: upload moderation.”
It would seem that the EU agreed to some extent. In April, leaked documents showed that EU interior ministers requested an amendment to the regulation. This change would have exempted professional accounts of staff of intelligence agencies, police and military from the scanning of chats and messages. This seems to be a tacit admission that this kind of mass scanning would risk breaching those users’ privacy. When covering the leak, outlets such as the EU Reporter argued that said privacy should also be enjoyed by private individuals and businesses.