To clarify for fellow readers, since this is a messy situation:
This is about a new temporary measure to legally allow instant-messaging providers to scan their users' messages. Providers lost that legal right when the previous interim act (the Interim Derogation of the ePrivacy Directive, sometimes called "Chat Control 1.0") expired on 4 April 2026. Several large providers have said they'll keep scanning regardless.
This is only one piece of a bigger effort. For years the Commission has been trying to put a more permanent regime in place (the CSA Regulation, or "Chat Control 2.0") without success.
As both a lawyer and a software engineer, I don't understand why big tech and EC want to scan messages, if they actually want to combat online abuse. The research points the other way:
- Most messages on these services are end-to-end encrypted, so they can't be scanned at all (assuming the E2EE is implemented correctly). The Commission itself says 70% of messages on popular chat platforms are E2EE [1].
- Instant messaging isn't the main distribution channel for CSAM in the first place, per data from the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children [2].
So the evidence points to low overall efficacy for message scanning against its stated goal of combating online child sexual abuse.
I don't think it'll pass this time. What worries me more is the spread of mandatory age-verification laws worldwide. That train is already going full steam ahead..
> I don't understand why big tech and EC want to scan messages
I believe that's a form of corporate greenwashing. If you can prove your claims that you do everything in your power to prevent abusive materials, you're going to get less attention from annoying authorities next time a pedo network/terrorist cell hits the news.
Aside from that, there are a lot of well-meaning people who want to try every little thing to help stop horrific abuse. Police investigations are happening too slowly (if at all); if the police won't help solve the problem, going the civil route may help, even if just a little. I think it's an act of desperation rather than malice. Plus, just like there are plenty of people who say "they've got nothing to hide, I don't need encryption", there are plenty of people who feel like a tech panopticon is worth it if it catches some abuse cases. Besides, in cases like these, scientific evidence often doesn't matter as much as the emotion behind proposals, and most messaging providers couldn't appear more devoid of emotion if they tried.
I don't agree with the idea to scan every message for various reasons. If the police won't investigate criminals with the massive amount of power they already possess, overwhelming them with "abusive" material from an algorithm is only going to make it harder to filter out the real criminals. Plus, if a few large providers do it, that will put pressure on all the other providers that don't do it (see, for instance, that time they arrested the CEO of Telegram for not volunteering information without a warrant, like other messaging providers seem to do).
But, as much as I disagree, I do understand where those people are coming from. And then there are also the blatant comic-book villains that just want totalitarian government control over all information exchange, of course.
I'd say this is more about being able to identify and crush any nascent political movements that threaten the status quo in their infancy, but no reason not to let the implementers wet their beak to get buy in.
You could additionally point out that most EU states are DEfunding helping actual victims of CSAM. Because they are. So is the UK, for what it's worth.
This supposed goal of the legislation never even gets mentioned in the discussions about these laws.
Which seems to go further into that direction you're pointing to as well: this is about scanning all instant messages across the entire EU, for reasons other than protecting children. They don't even discuss actually protecting children.
We're moving towards total surveillance slowly but surely. Age verification. Chat control. To an extent also the digital euro. It all seems hopeless, they're pushing this through despite what semblance of a democratic process we have clearly being against it.
[that is not to speak of how undemocratic the european system is and how badly it needs reform. Von der leyen should never have been able to get the role she holds]
This is and has always been inevitable with tech.
Politics can only postpone people's inherent desire to control and dominate and powerful tech makes this easier and cheaper.
We (the tech people) have built the perfect tools to centralize and automate control and we're still doing it, mostly for free.
The way things are going, our imagination is probably too poor to visualize the kind of dystopia this can/will eventually grow into.
It's highly unlikely that the general population will revolt against this - fear makes most people docile and compliant, self censoring and obedient. There are many examples of this in the world right now and it's only going to get worse.
We can only push back to postpone this, but the tide is against us and too few really care about these things.
The way things are going, our imagination is probably too poor to visualize the kind of dystopia this can/will eventually grow into.
I think intelligent people are able to visualize the dystopia this creates. They just prioritize their personal paycheck over best societal outcomes. It's very easy to delude yourself into thinking what you are doing is great, given enough money.
There are people working on the Meta analytics panopticon, there are people working on the Google analytics panopticon, there are people working on optimizing Google Android/Apple remote attestation to remove the last escape hatches from total surveillance, heck there are even people working at Palantir, despite knowing what this all leads to.
Many of us helped building this.
It's highly unlikely that the general population will revolt against this - fear makes most people docile and compliant, self censoring and obedient.
Even if it was not direct fear of what surveillance is supposed to solve, a lot of people in Western countries are more occupied with being able to afford housing and making ends meet. If that doesn't work, they can always fall back to some good ol' hatred of immigrants ("the immigrants are taking all your houses and jobs!"). It's sad.
Non-democracies speedrun towards surveillance even faster. Democracy is the best we have and this action is anti-democratic.
The other part of the story is that as long as Europe continues to vote radical rights + conservatives, we are going to get more and more of this. Most greens and progressives fight this tooth and nail.
What is anti-democratic about trying to assemble a coalition to change lawmakers' minds and get them to vote differently? It is rather core to democracies that decisions aren't set in stone and if you disagree with the majority you can always try to renegotiate.
While most greens and progressives may be against this particular law, I rather doubt that if they introduced a progressive green law for a vote and failed to get a majority, they would immediately give up and never try to get such a law passed ever again.
And I think it's good that nobody has to give up on politics just because they lost once.
I get your point, but I think there are several issues:
- Chat Control gets pushed by lobbyists, who have far more/better access to politicians than citizens. It is true that there are also some non-profits lobbying in this case, but the surveillance economy companies that are pushing this behind the scene have very deep pockets and very deep access.
- Chat Control gets pushed over and over again by the EC, which is the least accountable/democratic between the Parliament, Council, and Commission.
If you look outside the EU, there are enough examples of governments that are democratically elected, but are in practice not accountable to citizens because they are in the pockets of large companies that funded their campaigns, etc.
It's also this learned helplessness of the voters, a very useful tool for whoever wants to push their agenda. Have you noticed who the "anti-system" voters are actually voting for? They're voting exactly to increase borders, controls, surveillance, all for the children and against immigrants. Plus, this is the tech forum where the tech folks actually building the foundation for this surveillance, yes that's us, complain about inevitability. It's... sad to watch.
Robert Metsola met Ashton Kutcher (co-founder of Thorn, which develops message scanning tech) in March 2023 and posted a photo on Instagram. Kutcher lobbied MEPs hard in favour of strong detection measures.
Well it gets worse: Ashton Kutcher’s primary connection to Palantir Technologies is through Thorn, which uses Palantir’s AI and data-processing software to scan messages.
Original title: President vs Parliament: Metsola overrides MEPs in bid to force through child abuse law
Content from TFA:
> Ambassadors on Friday will consider an “invitation of the President of the European Parliament [to] proceed with the Council’s first reading position” on the proposal to allow tech companies to choose to scan for CSAM
> The European Commission proposed the temporary CSAM bill as a stopgap measure to allow companies to scan while legislators agreed on a more permanent solution.
> Tech firms continued to scan, despite the legal limbo.
> If capitals choose to adopt their position, the law does not automatically pass: The Parliament would need to either accept it or re-enter negotiations. “There is no certainty that [the Parliament] would adopt the legislative act in second reading in line with the Council’s first reading position,” Cyprus wrote in the note.
> Gregorová rejected the suggestion that lawmakers would budge. “The Parliament mandate is clear: A majority voted it down, meaning that we reject the extension.”
National politicians use the EU to bypass national democracy and then blame the EU publicly to deflect of their true involvement.
Uk was a leading EU country via being one of the largest financial contributors, and UK was behind many of the decisions they later blamed on 'EU Bureaucrats'.
You think "take back control" was about chat control? I don't. The UK could have controls on social media before Europe does. Taking back control is sloganised anti europeanism as a principle. It has no specific qualities to any subject it's just a belief British laws should be supreme.
It would've been a good reason to leave the EU, but a) Chat Control was barely a concern in 2016, and b) no the fuck it wasn't, the main reasons the UK left the EU are racism and being lied to about being able to get sweetheart deals.
The EU is destroying the decentralization that once made Europe the global apex of freedom, equality and prosperity, and turning Europe into a bloated, schlerotic and authoritarian bureaucracy like the Chinese and Ottoman empires that it once defeated.
To clarify for fellow readers, since this is a messy situation:
This is about a new temporary measure to legally allow instant-messaging providers to scan their users' messages. Providers lost that legal right when the previous interim act (the Interim Derogation of the ePrivacy Directive, sometimes called "Chat Control 1.0") expired on 4 April 2026. Several large providers have said they'll keep scanning regardless.
This is only one piece of a bigger effort. For years the Commission has been trying to put a more permanent regime in place (the CSA Regulation, or "Chat Control 2.0") without success.
As both a lawyer and a software engineer, I don't understand why big tech and EC want to scan messages, if they actually want to combat online abuse. The research points the other way:
- Most messages on these services are end-to-end encrypted, so they can't be scanned at all (assuming the E2EE is implemented correctly). The Commission itself says 70% of messages on popular chat platforms are E2EE [1].
- Instant messaging isn't the main distribution channel for CSAM in the first place, per data from the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children [2].
So the evidence points to low overall efficacy for message scanning against its stated goal of combating online child sexual abuse.
I don't think it'll pass this time. What worries me more is the spread of mandatory age-verification laws worldwide. That train is already going full steam ahead..
[1] https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/internal-security...
[2] Page 18, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
> I don't understand why big tech and EC want to scan messages
I believe that's a form of corporate greenwashing. If you can prove your claims that you do everything in your power to prevent abusive materials, you're going to get less attention from annoying authorities next time a pedo network/terrorist cell hits the news.
Aside from that, there are a lot of well-meaning people who want to try every little thing to help stop horrific abuse. Police investigations are happening too slowly (if at all); if the police won't help solve the problem, going the civil route may help, even if just a little. I think it's an act of desperation rather than malice. Plus, just like there are plenty of people who say "they've got nothing to hide, I don't need encryption", there are plenty of people who feel like a tech panopticon is worth it if it catches some abuse cases. Besides, in cases like these, scientific evidence often doesn't matter as much as the emotion behind proposals, and most messaging providers couldn't appear more devoid of emotion if they tried.
I don't agree with the idea to scan every message for various reasons. If the police won't investigate criminals with the massive amount of power they already possess, overwhelming them with "abusive" material from an algorithm is only going to make it harder to filter out the real criminals. Plus, if a few large providers do it, that will put pressure on all the other providers that don't do it (see, for instance, that time they arrested the CEO of Telegram for not volunteering information without a warrant, like other messaging providers seem to do).
But, as much as I disagree, I do understand where those people are coming from. And then there are also the blatant comic-book villains that just want totalitarian government control over all information exchange, of course.
As both a lawyer and a software engineer, I don't understand why big tech and EC want to scan messages, if they actually want to combat online abuse.
They don’t want to combat child abuse, they want to improve their advertising fingerprints.
I'd say this is more about being able to identify and crush any nascent political movements that threaten the status quo in their infancy, but no reason not to let the implementers wet their beak to get buy in.
You could additionally point out that most EU states are DEfunding helping actual victims of CSAM. Because they are. So is the UK, for what it's worth.
This supposed goal of the legislation never even gets mentioned in the discussions about these laws.
Which seems to go further into that direction you're pointing to as well: this is about scanning all instant messages across the entire EU, for reasons other than protecting children. They don't even discuss actually protecting children.
We're moving towards total surveillance slowly but surely. Age verification. Chat control. To an extent also the digital euro. It all seems hopeless, they're pushing this through despite what semblance of a democratic process we have clearly being against it. [that is not to speak of how undemocratic the european system is and how badly it needs reform. Von der leyen should never have been able to get the role she holds]
This is and has always been inevitable with tech. Politics can only postpone people's inherent desire to control and dominate and powerful tech makes this easier and cheaper.
We (the tech people) have built the perfect tools to centralize and automate control and we're still doing it, mostly for free.
The way things are going, our imagination is probably too poor to visualize the kind of dystopia this can/will eventually grow into.
It's highly unlikely that the general population will revolt against this - fear makes most people docile and compliant, self censoring and obedient. There are many examples of this in the world right now and it's only going to get worse.
We can only push back to postpone this, but the tide is against us and too few really care about these things.
> This is and has always been inevitable with tech.
Keyword here is "centralized". Financial interests have pushed gatekeeper-style setups into a crapshoot.
Therefore (part of) the solution is decentralization. P2P everything, web of trust, etc. 'Benevolent' dictators don't cut it anymore.
The way things are going, our imagination is probably too poor to visualize the kind of dystopia this can/will eventually grow into.
I think intelligent people are able to visualize the dystopia this creates. They just prioritize their personal paycheck over best societal outcomes. It's very easy to delude yourself into thinking what you are doing is great, given enough money.
There are people working on the Meta analytics panopticon, there are people working on the Google analytics panopticon, there are people working on optimizing Google Android/Apple remote attestation to remove the last escape hatches from total surveillance, heck there are even people working at Palantir, despite knowing what this all leads to.
Many of us helped building this.
It's highly unlikely that the general population will revolt against this - fear makes most people docile and compliant, self censoring and obedient.
Even if it was not direct fear of what surveillance is supposed to solve, a lot of people in Western countries are more occupied with being able to afford housing and making ends meet. If that doesn't work, they can always fall back to some good ol' hatred of immigrants ("the immigrants are taking all your houses and jobs!"). It's sad.
> We're moving towards total surveillance slowly but surely
We're actually speedrunning towards total surveillance.
I don't believe in democracy at all anymore.
Non-democracies speedrun towards surveillance even faster. Democracy is the best we have and this action is anti-democratic.
The other part of the story is that as long as Europe continues to vote radical rights + conservatives, we are going to get more and more of this. Most greens and progressives fight this tooth and nail.
What is anti-democratic about trying to assemble a coalition to change lawmakers' minds and get them to vote differently? It is rather core to democracies that decisions aren't set in stone and if you disagree with the majority you can always try to renegotiate.
While most greens and progressives may be against this particular law, I rather doubt that if they introduced a progressive green law for a vote and failed to get a majority, they would immediately give up and never try to get such a law passed ever again.
And I think it's good that nobody has to give up on politics just because they lost once.
I get your point, but I think there are several issues:
- Chat Control gets pushed by lobbyists, who have far more/better access to politicians than citizens. It is true that there are also some non-profits lobbying in this case, but the surveillance economy companies that are pushing this behind the scene have very deep pockets and very deep access.
- Chat Control gets pushed over and over again by the EC, which is the least accountable/democratic between the Parliament, Council, and Commission.
If you look outside the EU, there are enough examples of governments that are democratically elected, but are in practice not accountable to citizens because they are in the pockets of large companies that funded their campaigns, etc.
>The other part of the story is that as long as Europe continues to vote radical rights + conservatives,
Which itself happened due to a democratic deficit regarding migration.
It's also this learned helplessness of the voters, a very useful tool for whoever wants to push their agenda. Have you noticed who the "anti-system" voters are actually voting for? They're voting exactly to increase borders, controls, surveillance, all for the children and against immigrants. Plus, this is the tech forum where the tech folks actually building the foundation for this surveillance, yes that's us, complain about inevitability. It's... sad to watch.
Guess who is funding and lobbying this?
Robert Metsola met Ashton Kutcher (co-founder of Thorn, which develops message scanning tech) in March 2023 and posted a photo on Instagram. Kutcher lobbied MEPs hard in favour of strong detection measures.
I never imagined Ashton Kutcher's pivot to evil tech titan back when he was being goofy on That 70s Show or Dude Where's My Car?.
Well it gets worse: Ashton Kutcher’s primary connection to Palantir Technologies is through Thorn, which uses Palantir’s AI and data-processing software to scan messages.
Original title: President vs Parliament: Metsola overrides MEPs in bid to force through child abuse law
Content from TFA:
> Ambassadors on Friday will consider an “invitation of the President of the European Parliament [to] proceed with the Council’s first reading position” on the proposal to allow tech companies to choose to scan for CSAM
> The European Commission proposed the temporary CSAM bill as a stopgap measure to allow companies to scan while legislators agreed on a more permanent solution.
> Tech firms continued to scan, despite the legal limbo.
> If capitals choose to adopt their position, the law does not automatically pass: The Parliament would need to either accept it or re-enter negotiations. “There is no certainty that [the Parliament] would adopt the legislative act in second reading in line with the Council’s first reading position,” Cyprus wrote in the note.
> Gregorová rejected the suggestion that lawmakers would budge. “The Parliament mandate is clear: A majority voted it down, meaning that we reject the extension.”
So if I get this right all she can force is conciliation, which needs the parliament to agree on it in third reading anyway?
With democracies like this, who needs dictators?
This is one of the main reasons UK left EU.
National politicians use the EU to bypass national democracy and then blame the EU publicly to deflect of their true involvement.
Uk was a leading EU country via being one of the largest financial contributors, and UK was behind many of the decisions they later blamed on 'EU Bureaucrats'.
No, it wasn't. It was fundamentally about freedom of movement and little Englander racism, and lies about farming, the nhs and fishing.
Very few people voted on ID issues or chat control.
I said 'one of the' not the leading one.
"unaccountable EU' and 'taking back control' were key slogans.
And UK were behind the freedom of movement in question, namely the widening to eastern European countries.
You think "take back control" was about chat control? I don't. The UK could have controls on social media before Europe does. Taking back control is sloganised anti europeanism as a principle. It has no specific qualities to any subject it's just a belief British laws should be supreme.
It would've been a good reason to leave the EU, but a) Chat Control was barely a concern in 2016, and b) no the fuck it wasn't, the main reasons the UK left the EU are racism and being lied to about being able to get sweetheart deals.
Her, Kaja Kallas and Ursula Von Der Leyen ... who is the fourth horsewoman of the stupidocalypse?
I am shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED!
Slipping in censorship under the "think of the children" pretext is so cliché, I am not sure how EU thought this is going to convince anyone.
The EU is destroying the decentralization that once made Europe the global apex of freedom, equality and prosperity, and turning Europe into a bloated, schlerotic and authoritarian bureaucracy like the Chinese and Ottoman empires that it once defeated.