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Chat control: Home Affairs Committee approves regulation on indiscriminate searching of private communications

European Parliament Press releases

On 26 May, the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) approved a regulation that will allow e-mail, messaging and chat providers to automatically search all personal electronic mail and messages of each citizen for presumed child pornography or child grooming (so-called chat control or e-privacy derogation). If the search algorithms flag a message, users will be reported to the police and their communications will be disclosed. 54 MEPs voted in favour, 12 MEPs against. The plenary will take the final decision. The full text of the regulation is available here.

Shadow rapporteur Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party, Greens/European Free Alliance Group) criticises the decision:

“This regulation means all of our private e-mails and messages will be subjected to privatised real-time mass surveillance using error-prone incrimination machines inflicting devastating collateral damage on users, children and victims alike. Countless innocent citizens will come under false suspicion of having committed a crime, under-agers will see self-generated nudes (sexting) fall in wrong hands, abuse victims will lose safe channels for counselling. This regulation sets a terrible precedent and is a result of a campaign of disinformation and moral blackmailing from foreign actors. Unleashing such denunciation machines is ineffective, illegal and irresponsible. It’s using totalitarian methods in a democracy.”

Breyer points to a legal assessment by a former Court of Justice judge according to which indiscriminate chat control violates fundamental rights. According to a poll published in April 72% of Europeans oppose indiscriminate screening of their private messages.

The political agreement on the regulation with Council was possible after a majority of Parliament negotiators gave up most of the few limitations and safeguards the Civil Liberties Committee had initially requested last year:

  • language stating that technologies “should not include systematic filtering and scanning of communications containing text” has been deleted
  • using error-prone “artificial intelligence” to search unknown images and videos for possibly illegal content will be permitted
  • there will be no maximum error rate applicable to search algorithms, nor will “artificial intelligence” systems require prior authorization by data protection authorities
  • correspondence with doctors, psychologists, lawyers etc. covered by professional secrecy will not be exempted from monitoring
  • despite error rates of up to 86% according to police statistics, providers may automatically report “known material” to the police without human verification
  • police will not be required publish statistics on the number of false reports and the number of users prosecuted as a result of chat control
  • providers will not need to notify users they report to the police

The Commission is currently preparing follow-up legislation to make chat control mandatory for all providers, potentially including services that are so fare safely end-to-end encrypted. So far the process is used by US providers only. Abuse victim Alexander Hanff has been criticising chat control arguing

„it will not stop children from being abused, it will simply push the abuse further underground, make it more and more difficult to detect and ultimately lead to more children being abused as the end result.

Chat control information portal: www.chatcontrol.eu

 

Comments

2 Comments
  • Cyr4x

    This is being done just to legally spy our “private” conversation, not to protect anyone, especially children.

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