from the spies-in-our-pockets dept
The European Union Council is as soon as once more debating its controversial message scanning proposal, aka “Chat Management,” that may result in the scanning of personal conversations of billions of individuals.
Chat Management, which EFF has strongly opposed because it was first launched in 2022, retains being mildly tweaked and pushed by one Council presidency after one other.
Chat Management is a harmful legislative proposal that may make it necessary for service suppliers, together with end-to-end encrypted communication and storage companies, to scan all communications and recordsdata to detect “abusive materials.” This may occur by way of a technique known as client-side scanning, which scans for particular content material on a tool earlier than it’s despatched. In follow, Chat Management is chat surveillance and features by getting access to the whole lot on a tool with indiscriminate monitoring of the whole lot. In a memo, the Danish Presidency claimed this doesn’t break end-to-end encryption.
That is absurd.
We now have written extensively that client-side scanning basically undermines end-to-end encryption, and obliterates our proper to personal areas. If the federal government has entry to one of many “ends” of an end-to-end encrypted communication, that communication is now not protected and safe. Pursuing this strategy is harmful for everybody, however is particularly perilous for journalists, whistleblowers, activists, attorneys, and human rights employees.
If handed, Chat Management would undermine the privateness guarantees of end-to-end encrypted communication instruments, like Sign and WhatsApp. The proposal is so harmful that Sign has acknowledged it would pull its app out of the EU if Chat Management is handed. Proponents even appear to understand how harmful that is, as a result of state communications are exempt from this scanning within the newest compromise proposal.
This doesn’t simply have an effect on folks within the EU, it impacts everybody around the globe, together with in the USA. If platforms resolve to remain within the EU, they might be compelled to scan the dialog of everybody within the EU. In the event you’re not within the EU, however you chat with somebody who’s, then your privateness is compromised too. Passing this proposal would pave the best way for authoritarian and tyrannical governments around the globe to observe go well with with their very own calls for for entry to encrypted communication apps.
Even when you take it in good religion that the federal government would by no means do something mistaken with this energy, occasions like Salt Storm present there’s no such factor as a system that’s just for the “good guys.”
Regardless of robust opposition, Denmark is pushing ahead and taking its present proposal to the Justice and House Affairs Council assembly on October 14th.
We urge the Danish Presidency to drop its push for scanning our personal communication and take into account basic rights issues. Any draft that compromises end-to-end encryption and permits scanning of our personal communication needs to be blocked or voted down.
Telephones and laptops should work for the customers who personal them, not act as “bugs in our pockets” within the service of governments, international or home. The mass scanning of the whole lot on our units is invasive, untenable, and should be rejected.
Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks weblog.
Filed Beneath: chat management, consumer aspect scanning, encryption, eu, surveillance
