In an apparent victory for digital privacy, the head of the largest political party in Germany has come out against controversial legislation that would enable mass online state surveillance.
German technology news site Heise Online reports that next week’s vote in the EU Council has now been delayed, although this was not confirmed at the time of writing.
Under the guise of fighting child sexual abuse material, the “Chat Control” regulations would enable the mass surveillance of private messages prior to encryption on platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp.
But cypherpunks know that even if this attempt fails, it’s only a matter of time before they try again, because this is a battle that has been fought many times.
In 1988, one of the founding members of the “cypherpunk movement,” Timothy C. May, predicted that computer tech would soon let people “communicate and interact in a totally anonymous manner” and the state would attempt to halt its spread, citing “national security concerns.”
He later presented this thesis at a 1992 meeting that kicked off the “cypherpunk movement” — a group of 1,300 people advocating for the widespread use of cryptography to preserve privacy.
This infamous group eventually included the likes of Hal Finney, Jack Dorsey and Satoshi Nakamoto, who created Bitcoin as money outside the control of the state in 2008.
May has been proven right time and time again. Over the past three years, European member countries have been debating whether to support the “Chat Control” bill in the name of child safety.
The European Union was due to vote on Oct. 14 on the Danish Presidency’s Chat Control proposal. Fight Chat Control, a website that tracks its progress, currently shows there are 12 member states in support, nine opposing, and six still undecided.However, member states representing at least 35% of the EU’s population can team up to block the bill.
The Christian Democrat Union/Christian Socialist Union yesterday signaled its opposition following intense public and private sector pressure. Germany, which holds 97 seats in the European Parliament, is seen as the deciding factor for whether the vote would pass.
Jens Spahn, leader of the CDU/CSU, warned against the bill’s overreach: “That would be like opening all letters as a precaution and seeing if there’s anything forbidden in them. That’s not possible, it won’t happen with us.”
Early Bitcoin developer Peter Todd, who definitely isn’t Satoshi despite what a HBO documentary claimed earlier this year, tells Magazine that Chat Control is an unprecedented violation of privacy.
“Obviously, this is utterly absurd, an incredible violation of communication privacy unprecedented in human history. It must be stopped,” he says.
“It’s not a surprise. Politicians in the EU have been pushing for it for years,” he adds.
Chat Control: Won’t someone think of the children?
Chat Control, formally known as Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse (CSA), requires messaging apps to allow regulators to scan messages for child sexual abuse content before they’re sent.
However, critics argue it’s a Trojan horse that would kill off privacy by making end-to-end encryption useless.
“Quite simply, Chat Control completely defeats the security provided by end-to-end encryption,” says Todd.
“It’ll mandate that a snitching module be installed in all chat software that’ll detect content the government doesn’t like, and undetectably report it.”
Many people worry that once the government is given the power to scan messages for child sexual abuse material (CSAM), they could then “scope creep” into scanning for anything else they see fit to spy on.
“That snitching module won’t be possible to audit. So you’ll have no idea what it’s actually doing – it’ll be quite possible for governments to snoop on everything from communication between individuals they don’t like, to entire classes of content,” says Todd.
There are many more reasons cypherpunks don’t want it passed.
Some argue it is likely to generate so many false positives from misidentifying parents’ photos of their own kids playing that it will hurt regular folk while sucking up police resources, making it even harder to catch the real criminals.
Others argue the law undermines Europeans’ fundamental rights to privacy and data protection, violating Article 7 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
Chat Control could be a national security catastrophe
Or, worse, it could give bad actors a chance to use the same backdoor.
“From a national…
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