EU Parliament Passes Message-Scanning ‘Chat Control’

The European Parliament has passed legislation allowing tech firms to scan messages for child sexual abuse material until 2028, a controversial law dubbed “chat control” by critics.

EU lawmakers on Thursday largely voted against extending the regulation, dubbed “Chat Control 1.0,” but stopping it required 361 lawmakers to reject it. Only 314 voted to stop the law, and 276 supported it.

The vote advances reviving the “chat control” rules that expired in April, and has been a controversial topic among privacy and cryptography advocates, as the originally designed law breaks the principle behind encrypting messages.

Parliament, however, passed an exemption to exclude “communications to which end-to-end encryption is, has been or will be applied,” handing a small win to cypherpunks.

Pirate Party MEP Markéta Gregorová, whose party put forward the amendment to exempt end-to-end encrypted messages, said its success was “a bittersweet victory.” 

“Protecting encryption was one of our priorities, and I am therefore glad that we managed to secure an absolute majority for an amendment that at least preserves encryption. At the same time, however, voluntary mass scanning unfortunately passed,” she said.

The law’s supporters argue it is vital to protect children and combat the spread of abusive material.

The parliament’s laws with amendments will be sent back to the Council of the EU, a body of ministers from the bloc’s member nations who will approve or reject the legislation.

Chat Control battle “just getting started”

The vote on Thursday comes after the European Parliament voted through a rarely used urgent procedure on Tuesday that brought lawmakers back to vote on whether to extend a legal framework for the laws that expired in April.

Since the framework expired, messaging platforms such as WhatsApp have been allowed to take their own voluntary measures to seek out those sharing abusive material.

In March, Parliament had rejected a temporary extension of the scheme while a new permanent version of the law, dubbed “Chat Control 2.0,” was under discussion, before the European People’s Party, the largest group in Parliament, revived the extension in the urgent procedure vote on Tuesday.

The party had largely voted against extending the laws in March because of amendments that restricted the scope of scans, but its leader, Manfred Weber, has been looking for ways to push through the extension without changes.

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Breyer, the former MEP, said the “political battle over the permanent ‘Chat Control 2.0’ is just getting started.”

“The resistance we saw in Parliament today was so strong that finding a majority for permanent, suspicionless mass scanning in future negotiations is a complete pipe dream,” he said.

Negotiations for the permanent law, or “Chat Control 2.0,” will resume in September, with lawmakers disputing whether message scanning should be targeted or applied broadly.

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