But it is to Protect the Children – and Hurt Everyone Else

The EU has proposed a bill that would require cloud providers to search for child sexual abuse material (AKA CSAM or Kiddie Porn) in all private communications, even end to end encrypted ones.

EU lawmakers are divided on the wisdom of such a law, but the debate continues.

Other critics of the plan are WhatsApp, Signal, Proton, legal, security and data protection experts; civil society and digital rights groups AND a majority of lawmakers across the political spectrum in the EU Parliament.

The critics say that this law will fail to protect anyone because the system will generate millions of false positives a day due to flawed AI models that scan through billions of messages a day.

A planned meeting of ambassadors representing all of the member states had been expected to reach a compromise, but apparently not. The issue dropped off the parliament agenda this week after it became clear that they did not have an agreement on the issue and any vote on the bill would fail.

As long as the parties (the European Commission, EU Parliament and the Council) remain divided, the bill won’t go anywhere.

No matter how you phrase this law, this would be mass surveillance of hundreds of millions of people’s private communications. Of course, all of the scanning would be perfect and no one’s life would be ruined by being accused of possessing child porn.

Kiddie porn traders will just encrypt the data before they upload it, foiling scanning efforts and making it a little harder – but far from impossible – to trade kiddie porn. Yes, you will arrest a few people, but not any of the heavyweights, so the result will be that kiddie porn will still be as available as ever.

Some companies, like Signal, say (sure, I believe them) that they would leave the EU rather than comply.

It is likely that this is not the end of this proposal. Expect pro-surveillance lawmakers to put some lipstick on this pig and try again. It appears that they may be only one vote away from moving this to the next step, which is not to make it a law, but rather to continue the conversation and try to get to that point.

Of course the EU is not the only place that has a surveillance state mentality. For those of you not steeped in the history of police surveillance, all you have to do is go back to the 1990s and Google “Phil Zimmerman”. This is not new; governments do not like it if they cannot surveil their citizens and I don’t expect that to change.

Credit: Tech Crunch

by