EU is postponing vote on chat control due to lack of support

There will be no vote next week on a proposal by Denmark to introduce chat control. The Danish Presidency of the Council of the European Union has removed the vote from the agenda because of insufficient support.

According to anonymous sources, on Wednesday evening, representatives of the EU Member States met to discuss the regulation on automated detection of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM.

These discussions revealed that there was insufficient support among Member States for Denmark’s compromise proposal, which incorporated plans for scanning messages before they are encrypted. Therefore, the vote on the controversial message-scanning proposal has been postponed, which was scheduled for October 14.

Allegedly, the reason for this was that Germany refused to back the EU’s chat control regulation. This blocked the required majority in the EU Council.

“We are opposed to the unwarranted monitoring of chats. That would be like opening all letters as a precautionary measure to see if there is anything illegal in them. That is not acceptable, and we will not allow it,” Jens Spahn, Chairman of the conservative CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, said in a public statement.

“EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen must now admit the failure of her dystopian chat control plan. The Commission must withdraw this irreparable bill for good, as it has failed to find a majority in the Council for years,” Patrick Breyer, member of the Pirate Party, said in a statement.

The European Commission has been trying to introduce a law to combat the distribution of CSAM.

In the past three years, multiple proposals have been discussed by the political leaders of European Member States, but to no avail due to privacy concerns of European citizens and risks of potential mass surveillance.

The original proposal aimed to detect CSAM by requiring backdoors in the encryption of chat services like Signal and WhatsApp. The proposal suggested scanning all digital communications, including messages, links, photos, emails, and audio messages. The compromise proposal weakens this requirement slightly by only scanning photos, videos, and URLs.

There’s been a lot of outrage over the chat control proposal, suggesting it’s a slippery slope into mass surveillance.