Yaël Ossowski is the deputy director at the Consumer Choice Center, a leading advocate of privacy rights and freedom of expression, with offices in North America, Europe, and Asia.
He spoke with europeanconservative.com’s Rafael Pinto Borges about ‘Chat Control,’ the controversial electronic messaging surveillance law currently under discussion in the European Council. The Council is expected to formalize its position on the Danish version of Chat Control on September 12th in preparation for a vote on October 14th.
Described as the EU’s attempt to end private messaging, Chat Control would mandate the scanning of all electronic communications—including encrypted messages, before encryption—ostensibly as part of efforts to combat child sexual abuse material. First introduced in 2022, the proposal has faced strong opposition from several member states—and with good reason, says Ossowski.
At its core, the Chat Control law proposes scanning all private communications ‘for safety.’ Many critics see this as digital mass surveillance. How do you view the law in terms of proportionality and basic civil liberties?
The EU’s Chat Control regulation has an intended purpose, namely to compel messaging providers to detect and report child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and to flag and disable the accounts sharing it. Police agencies in member states are supposed to be the liaisons. This is a new ‘duty’ forced on private providers of encrypted software that effectively breaks the encryption algorithms that currently protect private messages from being read or seen by anyone apart from their intended recipient.
Once more, this is an example of using an egregious example that any rational person would abhor—images of children being abused—and using this as a justification to grant police new powers to eavesdrop on private communications. The regulation purports to be a crime-fighting tool, but police already have discretion to file judicial orders to gain access to devices. Realistically, this is an opening of the Overton window to normalize our state institutions taking a peek into our devices that will inevitably be abused to put otherwise innocent people in legal jeopardy.
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