Chat Control, as the proposal is called, is an unprecedented invasion of privacy. He wants to proactively monitor all communication through chats and search for “suspicious” content in it.
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The European Commission wants to check everything we write to each other via Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal and other chat services.
Proposal for an EU regulation on the prevention of CSA (child sexual abuse), introduced in 2022 by outgoing EU Home Affairs chief Ylva Johansson, sent shockwaves through the privacy and human rights communities. Its essence is mandatory proactive monitoring of all private communications of citizens through chat rooms, including breaking encryption.
The goal is to search for suspicious content in advance, especially child pornography, and identify it. The security services in the individual member states would decide how the scanning will take place in practice and what will be searched for. And that would open up the possibility for them to monitor anyone’s communication without the need to report it to anyone, but to request consent for such monitoring. There is probably no need to write in more detail about the possibilities of abuse of such an approach.
This proposal literally shocked the public, because it represents a huge threat and such a massive intervention in the privacy of citizens, which has no precedent. Of course, there was a huge wave of criticism from all sides – from civil rights activists, to lawyers, security experts to software specialists. Even independent lawyers who analyzed the proposal for the EU said that such a law would constitute a massive violation of digital human rights and negate the principle of the presumption of innocence, so that the EU’s highest court would almost certainly strike it down.
However, whatever the European officials come up with, they will not let go and the pressure to adopt this “Orwellian” law is still strong. For its approval, the European Commission needs the support of the European Parliament and the Council of the EU (a body representing the governments of all 27 EU member states). Fortunately, some countries have enough common sense (Slovakia is not among them) not to support it, and so the situation is still at a stalemate. However, there are few dissatisfied people and there is a risk that some countries will withdraw their disapproval.
Germany, Poland, Austria, Estonia, Slovenia and Luxembourg are among its unequivocal opponents, and France, Italy and the Netherlands are also more against it. At the end of September, after pressure from Hungary, which currently presides over the Council of the EU, the latter declared that it was considering withdrawing its opposition, but the Dutch finally took note of the active resistance of civil society and for now stand on the side of the opponents of this unprecedented “espionage” law, stating that even cosmetic the changes made in it do not guarantee the protection of the privacy of EU citizens.
Recently, more than three hundred researchers and scholars from across Europe published an open letter stating that there is no way to systematically scan and report private messages while preserving the true privacy of chat participants, regardless of whether the scanning takes place on people’s devices , or on servers.
Experts and activists believe that at the end of this year, the European Commission, already in its new composition, will definitely sweep this failed and dangerous proposal off the table and come up with a better and, above all, feasible idea that would solve the serious problem of sexual abuse of children in a way that is in line with EU regulations on human rights.
Source: vat.pravda.sk
