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The European Union is planning to bypass its own parliament to implement widespread surveillance of private online messaging.
Efforts by the European Council and Commission to force the automatic monitoring of private messages between individuals, a move privacy organisations warned would effectively mean the end of digital message encryption in Europe, were shot down by MEPs in March over fears of overreach.
Brussels is now looking to bypass the bloc’s only directly democratically elected body to implement the regime.
European Parliament President Roberta Metsola has announced she will force MEPs to vote on the proposal again this week under the rarely used “ordinary legislative procedure”.
The new vote will take place under different rules than the previous, requiring an “absolute majority” of MEPs to vote against the bill to successfully torpedo it.
In this context, an “absolute majority” represents exactly 361 or more MEPs out of the parliament’s total of 720. This is despite the fact that the European Parliament chamber is rarely filled with every single elected member.
By contrast, passing the bill will only require a “simple” majority of more than half of the members in the chamber on the day of the vote, meaning it will be able to pass with minority support.
Even if MEPs manage to prevent a “simple” majority from passing the digital surveillance system, there remains a strong possibility the rules will pass under the “ordinary legislative procedure”. Under the rules, if MEPs fail to either pass the bill or definitively reject it within three months, the legislation will pass automatically without their official approval.
Under the proposed reforms, tech giants would be forced to preemptively scan user messages for certain forms of illegal content, namely child sex abuse material (CSAM).
Campaigners backed by the European Commission have claimed this is needed to protect vulnerable children inside the bloc, and that this scanning can be done without jeopardising digital encryption.
Tech experts have lambasted such a claim as incomprehensible, with numerous industry insiders insisting that such a system of mandatory message scanning would, in effect, end encryption within the European Union.
“You cannot create a backdoor that only lets the ‘good guys’ in, and scanning content prior to encryption still breaks the privacy assurances guaranteed by end-to-end encryption,” Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal messaging application, said regarding the proposal last year.
The privacy-focused platform vowed that it would cease operations in Europe should the chat control regime pass, saying that it would not be able to implement the forced scanning of messages in good conscience.
“To be clear, we will stay to the end. We stand with the people in Europe and their right to privacy, whatever the Commission does,” Whittaker said.
“But we won’t comply with any mandate to undermine our privacy guarantees. And noncompliance would result in our being barred from the market.”
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