Europe's New War on Privacy

Summary

In theory, Chat Control should have been buried last month. The EU’s ominous plan to mass-scan citizens’ private messages was met with overwhelming public resistance in Germany, with the country’s government refusing to approve it. But Brussels rarely retreats merely because the public demands it. And so, true to form, a reworked version of the text is already being pushed forward — this time out of sight, behind closed doors. Chat Control, formally known as the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, was first proposed by the European Commission in 2022. The original plan would have made it mandatory for email and messenger providers to scan private, even encrypted, communications — with the purported aim of detecting child sexual abuse material. The tool was sold as a noble crusade against some of the world’s most horrific crimes. But critics argued that the tool risked becoming a blueprint for generalised surveillance, by essentially giving states and EU institutions the ability to scan every private message. Indeed, a public consultation preceding the proposal revealed that a majority of respondents opposed such obligations, with over 80% explicitly rejecting its application to end-to-end encrypted communications. Yet despite repeated blockages, and widespread criticism for violating privacy and fundamental rights, the text was never abandoned. Instead, it was repackaged, and continually pushed forward from one Council presidency to the next. Each time democratic resistance stopped the original plan, it kept returning in new forms, under new labels, each time dressed up as a “necessary” and “urgent” tool to protect children online, yet always preserving its core logic: normalising government-mandated monitoring of private communications on an unprecedented scale. “The tool was sold as a noble crusade against some of the world’s most horrific crimes.” In May, the European Commission once again presented its proposal. Yet several states objected. That included Germany, but...