Survey for the parties in parliament and a newly leaked Chat Control proposal

Konstellationen

2024-09-12

Newly leaked Chat Control proposal. The EU governments are to position themselves on the proposal by 23 September. Kamratdataföreningen Konstellationen has emailed a survey with questions about Chat Control to the parties in parliament

(This post is a translation and summary of the post in Swedish: Enkät till riksdagspartierna och nytt läckt förslag om Chat Control)

According to the German pirate party politician Patrick Breyer, there is a newly leaked Chat Control proposal:

On Monday a new version of the globally unprecedented EU bill aimed at searching all private messages and chats for suspicious content (so-called chat control or child sexual abuse regulation) was circulated and leaked by POLITICO soon after. According to the latest proposal providers would be free whether or not to use ‘artificial intelligence’ to classify unknown images and text chats as ‘suspicious’. However they would be obliged to search all chats for known illegal content and report them, even at the cost of breaking secure end-to-end messenger encryption. The EU governments are to position themselves on the proposal by 23 September, and the EU interior ministers are to endorse it on 10 October.

So the EU governments are to position themselves on the proposal by 23 September according to Patrick Breyer. The Swedish journalist Emanuel Karlsten wrote last week that Hungary is working on a new Chat Control proposal.

Survey to the parties in the Swedish parliament regarding Chat Control

The process with Chat Control is quite messy. And Swedish parties have acted differently on different levels. For example, Swedish EU MEP:s from Liberalerna (The Liberals) and Moderaterna (Conservatives) have expressed critique regarding Chat Control in the EU. But in the Swedish goverment (both Liberalerna and Moderaterna are a part of the Swedish goverment) and in the Swedish parliament, the same parties have acted in favor of Chat Control. And in June, some parties, Vänsterpartiet (The Left) and Miljöpartiet (The Green Party), missed the opportunity to express critique when the issue was on the agenda in Justitieutskottet (the Justice Committee in the Swedish parliament).

Because of that, Kamratdataföreningen Konstellationen has emailed a survey with questions regarding Chat Control, surveillance and privacy to the parties in the Swedish parliament so they can make their stance clear.

We sent the emails several weeks ago and set the deadline to teh 18th of September. We might have to publish the results before that if the issue will be on the agenda in a committee meeting.

Several parties have alredy responded, other have said they will respond before the deadline and other parties are yet to respond.

We publish the questions here in English in hope of this can be of use for other organizations and individuals in other EU countries. Some countries are more Swedish oriented and can be skipped or adjusted to your country’s situation.

All questions are framed so that if the party is against Chat Control, mass surevillance and thinks privacy is a good thing, they should answer “yes” to each question.

The questions are the following:

Question 1

Background:

In May 2022, EU Commissioner Ylva Johansson put forward the proposal that is popularly known as Chat Control 2.0. The proposal is intended to prevent and combat sexual abuse of children and such material (CSAM material). The proposal has received criticism because the proposal is based on incorrect assumptions about how messaging services work technically and that it undermines the possibility of secure communication.

Question: Are you opposed to the EU Commission’s proposal called Chat Control 2.0?

Question 2

Background:

In November 2023, the EU Parliament voted for a substantially revised proposal. The proposal means, among other things, that there must be a suspicion of crime and fully encrypted chats would be exempt from scanning. The most criticized parts of Chat Control 2.0 were thus removed, such as mass scanning of entire services.

All party groups in the EU Parliament voted for the proposal. All Swedish MEP:s also voted for the proposal.

Question: Do you support the EU Parliament’s compromise proposal?

Question 3

Background:

A big part of the discussion about Chat Control has been about all user communications being monitored by a service if the service receives a tracking order against it, even if there is no criminal suspicion against the individual user. The effect would be that if e.g. Facebook receives a tracking order against it, all users’ communications must be scanned, including private chat messages between two people who are not suspected of a crime.

Question: Do you think that monitoring and scanning should only be aimed at suspects, and not generally at all users?

Question 4

Background:

Many critics have raised the problem that the scanning would also include end-to-end-encrypted communication, i.e. communication where only those communicating can see the communication in plain text. (Even the servers used cannot read the content of end-to-end encrypted communication.) Examples of apps that use end-to-end encryption are Signal, WhatsApp or iMessage. In order to be able to scan such communications, the encryption must be bypassed, e.g. by forcing the app manufacturers to install backdoors in the apps so that the communication is scanned before it is encrypted and sent away (so-called client-side scanning).

Question: Do you think that end-to-end encrypted communication should continue to be allowed and that services or apps should not be forced to bypass the encryption?

Question 5

Background:

When Belgium held the presidency of the EU, they produced a compromise proposal by Chat Control. Part of the proposal was that end-to-end encrypted apps would be scanned before encryption took place, so-called client-side scanning. Users would be informed of this but if they said no, the app would be largely useless for a large part of communication, such as sharing images, videos and links. Critics of Chat Control argued that Belgium’s proposal was largely the same mass surveillance proposal as the EU Commission’s original proposal.

The issue was raised at the Justice Committee’s meeting in the Swedish parliament on 18 June. It was about whether Sweden would stand behind Belgium’s compromise proposal.

C and SD reported dissent at the meeting, but after the meeting V and MP expressed that they would have done so too. Before the EU elections, several parties campaigned to stop Chat Control. It thus became unclear what all parties actually stood for on the issue.

Question: If Belgium’s compromise proposal (or very similar proposal) were to come up again in the EU Parliament, Riksdag or government, would you say no to the proposal?

Question 6

Background:

Many parts of Chat Control are technical. But at the end of the day, it’s about the view of private communication and privacy.

Question: Do you think that private communication is (or should be) a human right?

Question 7

Background:

Many critics have expressed concern that Chat Control would involve the creation of a surveillance apparatus that could then be used to scan for more content than CSAM material. The restriction to search for CSAM material is only legal and political, not technical. There is concern about a slippery slope where you first scan for CSAM material and later expand to search for other criminal material.

Question: Do you think there is a risk/likelihood of a slippery slope with Chat Control so that more than CSAM material is scanned for in the future?

Call on the parties to clarify their position

It is important to contact your country’s MEP:s in your country’s national parliament. That is important to uphold a blocking minority.

A Patrick Breyer wrote in a post:

In June we managed to stop the unprecedented plan by an extremely narrow “blocking minority” of EU governments: Chat control proponents achieved 63.7% of the 65% of votes threshold required in the Council of the EU for a qualified majority.

It is therefor priority to call on your country’s politician. When you have done that and want to do more, you can also email your EU MEP. You can find emails here.