And not just “on the agenda” in general, on today’s agenda at the European Council, “where national ministers from each EU country meet to negotiate and adopt EU laws”.
They never give up, and with “they” being the European Union, they only have to win once.
Tech Radar reports,
The EU proposal to scan all your private communications to halt the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is back on regulators’ agenda – again.
What’s been deemed by critics as Chat Control has seen many twists and turns since the European Commission presented the first version of the draft bill in May 2022. The latest development came in October 2024, when a last-minute decision by the Netherlands to abstain from the vote prompted the Hungarian Council Presidency to remove the matter from the planned discussion.
Now, about two months later, the controversial proposal has returned and is amongst the topics the EU Council is set to discuss today, December 4, 2024. EU members are also expected to express their vote on Friday, December 6.
That’s today, kids.
As mentioned, lawmakers have implemented some changes to the EU CSAM bill amid growing criticism from the privacy, tech, and political benches.
Initially, the plan was to require messaging services and email providers to scan all your messages on the lookout for illegal material – no matter if these were encrypted, like WhatsApp or Signal chats, for example, to ensure that communications remain private between the sender and receiver.
Lawmakers suggested employing what’s known as client side-scanning, a technique that experts, including some of the best VPN providers and messaging apps, have long warned against as it cannot be executed without breaking encryption protection. Even the UK halted this requirement under its Online Safety Act until “it’s technically feasible to do so.”
Fast-forward to June 2024, the second version of the EU proposal aims to target shared photos, videos, and URLs instead of text and audio messages upon users’ permission. There’s a caveat, though – you must consent to the shared material being scanned before being encrypted to keep using the functionality.
But surely the tech-savvy nonce’s will just use a P2P system, and the non-tech-savvy ones will use Royal Mail?
And, even though this is an EU proposal, you just know that it is coming to the UK too, don’t you!
The European Union has a deep hatred of liberty – as does the rest of the accursed “international community” (all these would-be world “governance” bodies).
This is why it is insane, utterly insane, for people (in various countries) who say they support freedom, indeed support “national independence”, to wave European Union flags.
If someone supports the European Union they are against freedom and they are most certainly (by definition) against the independence of their country.
Now we hear that the unelected judges in Romania (judges loyal to the “international community”) have “annulled” the first round of the Romanian Presidential Election – because the “wrong” candidates” came in first and second, and the preferred candidate of the “international community” came third – and so could not go into the run-off.
So this is what these people mean by “democracy” and “the rule of law”.
Will they be looking for kiddie porn?
Or will they be searching out anti-Islamic “hate speech”?
Or anti-police “hate speech”?
Or anti-woke “hate speech”?
Once you let them start on the first, there is no way they won’t progress to the rest of the list.
How long did it take for ‘anti-terrorism’ surveillance powers to be used to catch people placing the ‘wrong’ items in recycling bins?
The power to read all of your electronic communications ‘to prevent the spread of CSAM’ will be converted to the power to read all of your electronic communications for any reason we can dream up, or for no reason at all in a matter of days or weeks, no more. And, as with virtually-all other measures advertised as being ‘to protect the children’, or ‘to confiscate the ill-gotten gains of (insert disfavoured criminal-du-jour here)’ or ‘to save our NHS from benefits cheats’, or any one of the half-a-hundred heart-rending justifications that are always trotted out o justify them, the actual reduction of the claimed limitless horrors they are intended to reduce will be – nil.
llater,
llamas
Client-side scanning? So *MY* device will do the scanning and make a judgement. Well then, I’ll just use a client that *DOESN’T* scan my content.
bobby b – it will be justified with the “we are looking for kiddie porn” line, but OF COURSE the real target will be “Hate Speech” – i.e. political and cultural.
Seeking to exterminate political and cultural dissent is always the objective of the “Be Kind” “Diversity and Inclusion” security forces of the various regimes of the international community. The excuses (“Covid”, “Climate” – whatever) vary, but the objective is always the same – wipe out dissent.
bobby b and all, before the EU even “starts with kiddie porn” and ends up looking who knows how far up our inboxes, let’s make sure the “lookers” are squeaky clean.
How about an audit of ALL of their communications through whatever platform, mail service, or post-it notes from their refrigerators? Odious ideas are like porn after all: we know it when we see it (their attitude, not mine!)
I’m guessing we’d have to go no farther back than a year (a week?) in the comms of most EU officials to find something odious.
To the EUG (EU Government, pronounced “Ugh”): focus on eradicating your ranks of objectionable people before fixing all of us!