The European Union is attempting to implement the mass surveillance of private chats online under the guise of combating child sexual abuse.
The full text of the “Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse” contains provisions opponents are calling “chat control,” permitting EU authorities to engage in “bulk chat searches” of so-called “high-risk services.” Opponents say this effectively grants the EU carte blanche to access citizens’ private online communications.
“Limiting bulk chat searches to ‘high-risk services’ is meaningless because every communication service is misused also for sharing illegal images and therefore has an imminently high risk of abuse,” said German MEP Patrick Breyer.
“As the Council’s legal service has confirmed, the latest move does not change the nature of detection orders. Millions of private chats and private photos of law-abiding citizens are to be searched and leaked using flawed technology, without them being even remotely connected to child sexual abuse – this destroys our digital privacy of correspondence,” Beyer explained. “Despite lip service being paid to encryption, client-side scanning is to be used to undermine previously secure end-to-end encryption in order to turn our smartphones into spies.”
Confirmation of the EU’s “chat control” plans comes as the bloc is preparing to engage in the mass censorship of its citizens in the run-up to the upcoming European elections.
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