What you can do: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/messaging-and-chat-control/#WhatYouCanDo
Contact your MEP: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home
Edit: Article linked is from 2002 (overview of why this legislation is bad), but it is coming up for a vote on the 19th see https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/council-to-greenlight-chat-control-take-action-now/
My point being, what are they going to achieve with this? Ask WhatsApp to pass over their encryption keys?
It should be pretty obvious that you shouldn’t be sharing sensitive stuff on chat apps controlled by the NSA. Use element with encryption or something, maybe Briar etc. What are they going to do if you insist on using apps which use asymmetric client-side encryption, break TOR? Force you to use symmetric encryption and give the government your decryption keys?
I don’t see how they are going to spy on sensitive details of Europeans with this. They might as well ban phones completely if they want to limit communication.
These laws are being passed by politicians who generally don’t understand technology. What they will achieve is a reduction in privacy and liberty for every citizen in the EU and easier methods to clamp down on dissent. Just because it’s not technically perfect or difficult to implement fully doesn’t mean it’s not a threat. It’s one step closer totalitarianism, and what’s stopping totalitarianism is everyday people, one step at a time, battling it back.
So first it’s client-side scanning for CSAM. Not without some nobility. But the problem is once you wedge open that door it’s technically possible to do it for other things and so you become compelled to.
It’ll move from just CSAM to stopping and tracking “propaganda” as deemed by them which will be narrow-ish at first (anything pro-Russia, RT links, etc) but gradually expand over time to anything outside the mainstream branded as extremist (and guess what, privacy advocates will definitely fall within that label). And once that’s in place the private stake-holders, copyright holders will come knocking, they’ll say rightly so “hey you have the capability right now, we demand you implement client-side scanning to detect copyright violations” and then that will be ordered by a court, further enshrined by a law and oh look now you can no longer send political thought that the ruling regime disagrees with, can no longer surf the high seas, and so on and so forth. Congratulations and please enjoy living in the “garden” of Europe.
The US uses the Patriot Act to spy on innocent people under the guise of terrorism. Once you open the door, they knock the wall down.
