On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam talks about what the EU is calling “Chat Control”:
We need to talk about Chat Control, because it’s all happening this week and almost no one understands what it’s about.
In plain terms: the EU wants to authorize the scanning of your private messages. Your WhatsApp conversations, your emails, your DMs. Not those of a suspect. Those of everyone, all the time, by default.
The pretext is airtight, and that’s the trap: “protecting children”. No one can be against that. That’s exactly why it’s the perfect tool. They’ll never get you to swallow mass surveillance in the name of mass surveillance. They’ll get you to swallow it in the name of children, terrorism, disinformation. Always some cause you won’t dare challenge.
Understand the two-step mechanism well.
Today it’s the “soft” version: platforms have the right to scan, on a voluntary basis, unencrypted messages. Harmless on the surface. It’s the foot in the door.
Then comes the real version, the one under negotiation: mandatory scanning, including of your encrypted messages, analyzed directly on your phone before they’re even sent. Over 500 cryptographers have signed a letter saying it’s technically unfeasible without creating security vulnerabilities that any hacker or hostile state could exploit. You’re breaking encryption for everyone, including the criminals you claim to be targeting.
And the worst part isn’t even that.
The real danger isn’t that Brussels technocrats will be watching you tomorrow. They’re probably too spineless for that. The danger is that they’re building the infrastructure. Once scanning everyone’s messages becomes normal, legal, operational — the track is laid. And on that track will roll everything that comes next. The day a crisis brings ruthless people to power, they won’t have to invent anything. The machine will already be there, ready to go.
No surveillance infrastructure has ever stayed limited to its original purpose. None. It’s a law of administrative nature: a tool built for X always ends up serving Y.
What makes this text dangerous isn’t what it does today. It’s what it makes possible forever.
The decisive vote is Thursday. The last lock.
Auto-translated from the original French by X.
The good folks at Windscribe weigh in:
The EU is not a democracy.
They’re closer to a guy who keeps pressuring a girl to sleep with him despite her saying no.
5 times now.
But he won’t stop.
We’re at the stage where he’s giving her alcohol and making her drunk so she struggles to say no.
Over the last 3 years, Chat Control and similar scanning measures have been defeated or blocked 5 times.
The citizens of the EU and members of EU Parliament have made it abundantly clear — they don’t want Chat Control.
This latest attempt by the EU is the slimiest one yet. Revive dead legislation that was already defeated, flip the passing criteria so that majority don’t need to SUPPORT it, majority need to DEFEAT it, and as the cherry on top, hold that vote on the very last day before Parliament members go on summer break so that many don’t show up. Oh and if they don’t show up, it counts as a vote to pass Chat Control.
You can dress it up in as many legal technicalities and loopholes as you want, what the EU is doing here is fundamentally undemocratic.
No means no.
And if you ever saw a guy pressuring a girl into sleeping with him with disgusting tactics after she said no THIS many times, you would consider him to be a rapist.
So congrats to the EU on adopting rapist strategies to your governance.
