EU Parliament Civil Liberties Committee adopts position on CSAR

From the source:

> Chat control - one of the worst EU plans that is also being described as a surveillance monster - must be stopped. And the EU Parliament has just decided to do so! In a historic agreement on the EU Commission's Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR) the European Parliament wants to remove chat control requirements and safeguard secure encryption. The decision came after extensive backlash against the original proposal from technology and security experts, to international scientists and to citizens across Europe. This is a great win for our right to privacy and for upholding our democratic values in Europe, but the fight continues!

What did the EU Parliament decide?

Breyer writes on his website that internet services and apps must be "secure by design and default". The EU Parliament has agreed to:

    "safeguard the digital secrecy of correspondence and remove the plans for blanket chat control, which violate fundamental rights and stand no chance in court. The current voluntary chat control of private messages (not social networks) by US internet companies is being phased out. Targeted telecommunication surveillance and searches will only be permitted with a judicial warrant and only limited to persons or groups of persons suspected of being linked to child sexual abuse material."

A huge win for our privacy rights is also that the EU Parliament has decided to "clearly exclude so-called client-side scanning".

In contrast to the original chat control proposal, the version of the EU Parliament wants that a new EU Child Protection Centre proactively searches publicly accessible parts of the internet for child sexual abuse material with automatic crawling, which can also take place in darknet and would be much more efficient than private surveillance measures by providers. Found abuse material must be reported and taken down by the provider. Fight is not over

While the EU Parliament's decision is a huge win, the fight is not over. It is expected that the EU Commission will continue to push for general surveillance chat control measures. Now is the time for each and everyone of us to join this fight!

Despite the lobbying from American organisations (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir and others who worked with Thorn on this [1][2]) the EU Parliament did the right thing this time.

[1] https://www.thorn.org/partnerships/

[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20130420162917/http://www.wearet...

Isn't this is already a solved problem? This feels like a huge loss for player like Signal that actually ensure privacy by design

It's not that simple. If the country introduces a legislation, every company operating in it's border must comply.

If EU would introduce such legislation, it could potentially make software doing end2end encryption illegal. In such case, google would be removing it from EU Play Stores, and this would be more/less end of such messaging apps unless they comply. :-)

This is why it's important to have a reasonable legislature and laws.

This decision is about abandoning a plan to make end-to-end encryption illegal.