The EU proposal to scan all your private communications to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is back on the agenda of regulators.
What is considered Chat Control by critics has taken many twists and turns since the European Commission presented the first version of the bill in May 2022. The latest development took place in October 2024, when the Netherlands’ last-minute decision to abstain from the vote prompted the Hungarian Council Presidency to remove the issue from the planned discussion.
Now, about two months later, the controversial proposal has returned and is among the topics the EU Council will discuss today. December 4, 2024.
What is the EU CSAM scanning law?
As mentioned, lawmakers have made some changes to the EU CSAM bill amid mounting criticism from privacy, technology and political quarters.
Initially, the intention was to require messaging services and email providers to scan all your messages looking for illegal material – regardless of whether they were encrypted, such as WhatsApp or Signal chats, for example, to ensure that communications remain private between the sender and receiver.
Lawmakers proposed using what’s known as client-side scanning, a technique that experts, including some of the top VPN providers and messaging apps, have long warned against because it can’t be done without the encryption protection to break. Even Britain has halted this requirement under the Online Safety Act until “it is technically feasible to do so.”
Fast forward to June 2024: the second version of the EU proposal aims to target shared photos, videos and URLs instead of text and audio messages, after user consent. However, there is a caveat: you must agree to have the shared material scanned before it is encrypted in order to continue using the functionality.
This wording infuriated privacy experts, with Signal Foundation President Meredith Whittaker instead labeling this so-called “upload moderation” as a “rhetorical game.”
📣Official statement: The new EU chat control proposal for mass scanning is the same old surveillance with new branding. Whether you call it a backdoor, a front door, or “upload moderation,” it undermines encryption and creates significant vulnerabilitieshttps://t. co/g0xNNKqquA pic.twitter.com/3L1hqbBRgqJune 17, 2024
There was another version in September leaked by Politico. Communications providers would be free to decide whether or not to use artificial intelligence to flag images and text chats as suspicious. However, these companies would be legally required to scan all user chats and report when they found illegal content.
According to the latest data of the European Pirate Party, the vast majority of countries have already expressed their support for the new proposal. Even countries like France, which previously belonged to opposing governments, have now joined the list of supporters.
At the time of writing, only a few EU Member States are still undecided (Italy, Portugal and Finland) or opposed (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland and Slovenia).
However, this could change after the December 4 meeting.