No Government scanning of your messages

ChatControl, officially known as “the Regulation on Combatting Child Sexual Abuse Material online” is a proposal from the European Commission that seeks to fight abuse material by scanning the private correspondence of all EU citizens, even when that correspondence is encrypted.

The more we delved into the proposal, the more we discovered issues: there was a massive risk of false positives, the detection system would be trivial to bypass, and there was also a significant risk that it would overwhelm the police with false reports, and push abusers onto the darknet, where they are harder to trace. With support from my team and technical experts, we put these concerns into a white paper and shared it with colleagues.

Soon, concerns about the legality and efficacy of the proposed law were coming from all sides: a chorus of worried voices spoke out against the proposal. These voices range from the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) and European Data Protection Board, who have called the proposal “illegal”, to the French senate, as well as the Irish and Austrian parliaments, as well as the Council’s legal service.

Even after backroom dealing derailed my attempts to solve the problem as lead negotiator for Renew Europe in the Women & Equality committee, I continued to campaign against it and proposed alternate solutions that could actually help address abuse.

In the end, under immense pressure from myself, some of my colleagues, and numerous NGOs, lawyers, and privacy experts, parliament agreed to remove the scanning of encrypted messages from the law. 

Now, we are waiting for the Council to decide on their negotiation mandate for the trilogues, so keep your governments accountable