Suspicionless surveillance of private chat communication?

Government representatives in the EU Council in favour of suspicionless surveillance of private chat communication

Dr. Peter F. Mayer, tkp.at (German)

The right to private communication – for example as the secrecy of correspondence – had to be fought for in Europe against the resistance of those in power. For some time now, EU politics has been wrangling over the abolition of this fundamental right. Until now the EU Council, made up of the governments of the member states, had not been able to agree on a course of action. But now, following a proposal by the Belgian interior minister, it is to be adopted as early as June. This emerges from internal information leaked to Dr Patrick Breyer, Member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party.

The so-called “chat control” is considered one of the most controversial projects within the EU. If it were implemented, it would mean the end of encrypted chatting. Messenger services that offer nothing else could then be blocked in the EU. Like pretty much every measure for censorship and for weakening or abolishing fundamental rights, it is justified with the alleged protection of children.

The EU method, driven by the lobbyists of large multinational corporations, is a salami-slice approach as soon as serious resistance appears. Breyer reports that under the latest proposal, users of apps with communication functions would have to agree via terms and conditions or a pop-up message that all images and videos they send will be scanned automatically and without suspicion and, where applicable, reported to the EU and the police.

But this only works if encryption is weakened by back doors. The Belgians claim that the “upload moderation” they propose differs from “client-side scanning”. If you refuse surveillance by chat control, you can in principle still use the chat, but you can no longer send images and videos. The scanner algorithms are to forward to the EU and the police known material as well as unknown images and videos that “artificial intelligence” considers potentially suspicious. The searching of text messages for signs of “grooming”, which has hardly been used so far, is to be dropped, as is the scanning of audio communication, which has never been used.

The proposal presented on 8 May is intended to be acceptable to critical governments too. Tomorrow, 24 May, it is to be discussed further (German). After the EU elections, a meeting of EU interior ministers is planned at which this attack on privacy is to be adopted.

You can bet that this is only the beginning and that complete surveillance of private chats will follow, as the EU has demonstrated hundreds of times before.

Breyer writes:

“The leaked proposal shows that the EU Commission’s extreme initial draft for chat control, unique in the free world, is to be kept essentially unchanged,” warns MEP Dr Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party), the most prominent opponent of chat control. “The latest push for chat control is reminiscent of a TV show called ‘Let yourself be watched’. Using messenger services purely for text is not a serious option in the 21st century. And removing excesses of chat control that play no role in practice anyway is a sham. The fact remains: millions of private chats and private photos of law-abiding citizens are to be searched and forwarded using unreliable technology, without those affected having even the remotest connection to child abuse – that destroys our digital secrecy of correspondence. Our nude photos and family pictures end up with strangers in whose hands they don’t belong and with whom they are not safe. Despite lip service to encryption, client-side scanning is to undermine previously secure end-to-end encryption across the board in order to turn our smartphones into spies – that destroys secure encryption.

I am alarmed that previously critical EU governments are praising the repackaged plans, threatening to overturn the existing blocking minority. The German federal government is silent and, because of SPD interior minister Faeser, has been ‘unable to take a position’ for months – accordingly, it is not forming alliances with other critical states either. Not even a written opinion from the Council’s legal service on this obvious violation of fundamental rights has been requested so far. If the EU governments really go into the trilogue negotiations with this radical position on chat control, experience shows that Parliament, behind closed doors, risks gradually abandoning its initial position and agreeing to bad and dangerous compromises that put our online security at risk.

Now is the time to man the barricades for privacy and secure encryption!”

Original article on tkp.at (German)

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