Germany will not support the EU Commission’s “Chat Control“ proposal of a regulation on Child Sexual Abuse unless major changes are implemented, a leaked position paper reveals. Among the primary concerns are:
1) “Client-side scanning“ on personal devices. Germany wants to exclude end-to-end encrypted messages, audio communications, and phone calls from scanning.
2) Provisions that allow for server-side mass scanning of private communications and cloud storage, in which the government “reserve[s] the right to make additional requests at a later date“, questioning the “permissibility“ of such scans in view of fundamental rights. Indeed a study by the European Parliament’s Research Service on the legality of the proposed Child Sexual Abuse / Chat Control Regulation to the European Parliament’s lead Committee on Home Affairs (LIBE) violates fundamental rights.
3) The German government also insists that no voluntary mass scanning by providers (as currently practiced by various US services such as Facebook/Instagram Messenger, Gmail, and Outlook) should take place in the absence of an order.
4) The proposed age verification requirements for communications services “must allow for anonymous or at least pseudonymous use of the services in question“. It is feared that these requirements could effectively mean the end of anonymous email or messenger accounts, which can be essential for whistleblowers.
According to Dr Patrick Breyer, MEP and shadow rapporteur in the EU’s Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE), “the EU Commission’s globally unprecedented proposal of indiscriminately searching the content of any private correspondence and photos is increasingly falling apart. A Chinese-style mass surveillance scheme as extreme as this doesn’t exist anywhere else in the free world for a reason: It would inflict a death blow to the security and secrecy of communications as well as the right to communicate anonymously, which protect children, victims, whistleblowers, dissidents, industry, governments and many more.”
