The European Parliament’s Rapporteur, Birgit Sippel (S&D), has presented her draft report (Original, unofficial consolidated version). In it, she proposes extending the authorization for warrantless Chat Control, albeit with new restrictions: the most unreliable technologies—scanning text messages and automatically assessing unknown visuals—are to be excluded.
Mass Surveillance Remains the Status Quo While this proposal marks a partial victory for civil society, the “Stop Chat Control” alliance warns against celebrating too soon. The draft still permits the warrantless mass screening of every citizen’s private chats for “known material” (hash scanning).
From the first:
The Parliament’s Alternative: “Security by Design” The activists urge MEPs to stick to their own mandate. The Parliament had previously stated (Report A9-0021/2024) that a prolongation of this regulation “is only justified once.” Instead of mass surveillance, the Parliament proposes effective, fundamental-rights-compliant alternatives in the CSAR mandate:
** Security by Design: Mandatory safety default settings in apps to technically prevent unwanted contact by predators.
** Proactive “Crawling”: An EU Centre should proactively scan the public web and the darknet for illegal material, rather than reading private messages.
** Targeted Investigations: Surveillance of private communication should only occur based on reasonable suspicion against individuals and with a judicial order.
Call to Action Citizens can now use fightchatcontrol.eu to send protest emails directly to the members of the Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE). The campaign targets Rapporteur Birgit Sippel and the Shadow Rapporteurs, including Javier Zarzalejos (EPP), urging them to reject the extension as it stands (e.g., by restricting scanning to suspects with judicial authorization and excluding the most error-prone text or AI-based scanning).
A majority of MEPs voted on Thursday 26 March to reject extending a temporary exemption to EU privacy laws that permitted companies such as Meta, Google and LinkedIn to “indiscriminately” scan private messages for child abuse. The decision marks the end of a long-running attempt to introduce Chat Control legislation across Europe.
Great news!
But not the end of the story, I should say.
As I understand it, this was a vote for extending a prior regulation (or rather a temporary exemption) which permitted US Bigtech to scan private messages. It was voted down, which means the former exemption will stop on April 3 - consequently US behemoth will have to stop this indiscriminate scanning.
But in the pipeline, Chat Control 2.0 is still a sword of Damocles, with pending negociations between the European Commission, European Parliament and the European Council for a permanent regulation.
But this is a clear and encouraging sign that Europeans don’t want mass surveillance
Unfortunately, this was not the end of the story for Chat Control 1.0
The extension of this “temporary” regulation was voted down by EU Parliament in March, resulting in it dying on April 3.
But ruling powers - when they have an obsession - will absolutely NOT drop the matter and will promptly find a way to overturn that situation. The classic plot is to wait until the summer vacation begins and people go away, unconcerned about politics and world’s affairs while they have a good time on the beach.
And this is exactly what happened on July 8: a hasty procedural vote in which Parliament agreed to fast-track the proposal under an urgency procedure, bypassing the normal committee process and setting up the decisive vote just one day later.
This of course paves the way to the permanent and much worse privacy-killing Chat Control 2.0 still in the pipeline…
Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) commented:
The fact that Chat Control is moving forward against the will of the majority of voting MEPs is a farce and damages democracy
and
Privacy-focused email provider Tuta also condemned the vote, calling it “a sad day for the privacy of EU citizens”
Mullvad added
Chat Control 1 is back. Despite the European Parliament voting down the legislation twice this year, the Council of the European Union and parts of the Parliament today managed – through an urgent procedure – to extend it for another two years
