While the world’s attention is focused on the arrest of Telegram owner, Pavel Durov, and Brazil’s decision to ban Elon Musk’s X platform ( formerly Twitter), the European Union (EU) Council in Brussels is hoping to quietly greenlight the EU’s proposed controversial “Chat Control” legislation.
On Thursday, the EU is due to vote on planned legislation intended to introduce mass digital surveillance by means of fully automated real-time monitoring of messaging and chats, marking the end of private digital correspondence. Ostensibly, the proposal aims to prevent the online dissemination of child sexual abuse material. But there are growing concerns that the controversial new ruling will extend far beyond arresting purveyors of child porn and be used for the full-scale state-monitoring of personal and business communications in Europe and beyond.
There can be little doubt that Brussels, like the French authorities in the case of Durov, is now cynically using the cause of combatting child exploitation to further its own draconian agenda. In November, the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee voted against attempts from EU Home Affairs officials to roll out mass scanning of private and encrypted messages across Europe. In June this year, dozens of Parliament members also wrote to the EU Council, expressing their opposition to the proposal.
German MEP Patrick Breyer warned: “The proponents of Chat Control intend to exploit the period shortly after the European Elections during which there is less public attention and the new European Parliament is not yet constituted.”
“An age of unprecedented state and corporate surveillance”
Earlier this summer, Meredith Whittaker, the president of encrypted messaging service Signal, which is installed on around 100 million smartphones worldwide, also wrote an open letter damning the EU’s proposed anti-privacy legislation.
“End-to-end encryption is the technology we have to enable privacy in an age of unprecedented state and corporate surveillance. And the dangerous desire to undermine it never seems to die,” begins Whittaker.
“There is no way to implement such proposals in the context of end-to-end encrypted communications without fundamentally undermining encryption and creating a dangerous vulnerability in core infrastructure that would have global implications well beyond Europe,” warns Whittaker.
What the unelected authorities in Brussels may not fully grasp is that all kinds of cybercrime, including the dissemination of child pornography and illegal drugs (the main charges now being leveled against Durov in Paris), existed well before platforms such as Telegram and Signal existed and would continue to thrive in their absence. Most of the internet, roughly four-fifths, known as the Deep Web, is invisible to mainstream browsers such as Chrome and Bing. However, all the user needs to browse the Deep Web is to subscribe to a perfectly legal virtual private network service and download the free Tor browser.
Much of the Deep Web consists of abandoned websites or platforms hiding behind paywalls. But the Dark Web, which is fully encrypted, comprises criminal forums hosting cybercriminal groups whose ill-gotten revenues often exceed those of major corporations. Dark Web marketplaces offering child pornography refer to it euphemistically as “Cheese Pizza.”
The Brazilian Supreme Court also failed to understand the technological limitations of its own power and took down the X platform as it had ruled because all Musk had to do (and has done) was beam the X app to Brazil from space.
But the increasingly dictatorial regimes of Brussels and Brazil are not alone in attempting to impose heavy-handed control of digital communications technologies that they do not fully comprehend. The UK’s 2023 Online Safety Act also included a controversial content scanning requirement similar to that proposed in Brussels, although the British government has since acknowledged that enforcement of the act may not yet be technologically feasible.
It seems that governments across the world are now following the steps of countries like China and Russia in using online communications platforms to police the behavior and opinions of their citizens. The US Earn-It Act, for example, is similar to the UK’s Online Safety Act and aims “to establish a National Commission on Online Child Sexual Exploitation Prevention, and for other purposes (our italics).”
